Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

The Story: It’s early-ish 1900’s and Ralph Truitt puts an ad in the paper looking for a reliable wife.  He gets a lot of answers, but one of them really strikes him.  Through letters and pictures, he and Catherine Land decide to get married.  We meet both of them while Catherine is traveling to meet Ralph for the first time.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that Catherine has something a little bit more sinister on her mind than marriage.  We also learn that she has a past that, for some reason, she is going to extreme measures to hide.

When Ralph is severely injured on their journey home, things kind of go askew.  Instead of getting to know her future husband, Catherine is put in charge of nursing him back to health.  As he recovers, they do have a chance to get to know each other and they both realize that this is not really what they were expecting.

Ralph’s first wife had died 20 years ago and around the same time, his young son ran away from home.  Before he will agree to marry Catherine, he puts her in charge of bringing his son back to him.  This starts a twisty, crazy plot that I’m not going to ruin for you!

What I Thought: I don’t really know how to rate this one.  It was alright.  I thought that the story had some real drive and from the first few pages I was intrigued.  The first few mentions of poison and murder that Catherine made got me all excited.  The copy that I got of this book didn’t have a plot outline on the back, just some blurbs.  I had no idea that this was going to be a dark book, I thought it was just going to be about these two people meeting and loving or hating each other or whatever.  Murder is much more exciting, right? Right.

But something went wrong in the execution.  I think that what killed it for me was the excessive focus on sex.  It seemed like every single character was totally obsessed.  At first, I thought it was just Ralph and that it was a serious character flaw, then I realized that it was the author.  Meh.  I don’t mind a couple steamy sex scenes, but these just got out of hand. It just ended up being totally repetitious and boring.

The same can be said for the story, I guess.  The first twist I was pretty surprised, but then the whole book started repeating itself over and over.  Eventually I was just skimming along and kinda rolling my eyes.

I think that what was missing was heart.  There were all these different relationships and back stories and issues that could get super, super emotional.  I didn’t feel an emotion after about the first 10 pages.  Nothing.  There was nothing here that was stirring and there really should have been.  The story itself had some intrigue and merit, but the lack of any connection to characters or plot or anything solid just really diminished all of the positives.

Conclusion: If you’re a screenwriter, a producer, whatever- read this book and make it into a movie.  I think that this could be one of those rare circumstances where the movie would be better than the book.  There’s a lot to work with here, but just not really done well.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this, but if the movie comes out, I’ll make plans to see it!