How to Be a Good Wife, Emma Chapman's debut novel, is sure to appeal equally to thriller fans and readers who love Kate Chopin's The Awakening with its portrait of a housewife on the brink of sanity or madness, depending on whom you believe.
Middle-aged housewife Marta has few memories from before her marriage to Hector. She has spent her adult life focusing on her husband as instructed by her mother-in-law's wedding gift, a manual entitled How to Be a Good Wife ("Catering to his comfort will give you an immense sense of personal satisfaction"). On the surface, Marta is the picture of domesticity, loyal to Hector and devoted to their grown son, Kylan. However, as the reader learns more, Marta appears increasingly unstable, forgoing her prescription medication--allegedly in hopes of regaining more of her memory--in favor of blackouts and the hallucinations of a little girl who is sometimes clean and cheerful, sometimes filthy and violent. Is Hector a long-suffering husband who protects Marta, or a master manipulator hiding a secret so terrible it would shatter their family forever? Has the absence of pharmaceuticals cleared the fog obscuring a more sinister truth in their marriage?
Chapman keeps readers firmly planted in Marta's point of view, unable to distinguish truth from delusion. Readers will find themselves confronting their own biases about mental illness as they struggle along with Marta to make sense of her tense, troubled world in this subtle feminist thriller. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads