The Comrade's Wife by Assoc. Prof. Barbara Boswell

I unintentionally got a spoiler of The Comrade's Wife months ago (granted, it was the spoiler that made me want to read the book in the first place). I was entirely captivated by the first few pages, but my chest was clenched in anxious anticipation.

I found chapters are slightly long, but that’s on me and my attention span and not on the author’s writing. 

Watching Anita lose so much of her resolve, bit by bit, was heartbreaking. Mind you, this was only three months into the relationship. What stressed me the most was that she has the language for what she’s going through, given her educational background, but seems blinded to it all. I suspect this was done deliberately to show the contrast between her academic and lived experiences. 

Also, drawing parallels between this and A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo that I finished recently, the exact same red flags were exhibited: Diminishing her job (in this case, completely disregarding it), minimising any qualms raised by the women with “come on now” and using physical intimacy as a make-up brush rather than addressing the underlying issues that resulted in the arguments in the first place.

Oh and the parents??? These are the greatest enablers emhlabeni because why must your FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD SON be coddled to the point where you could write a manual on the wife he needs? Coddled like a toddler when you claim he is the man of YOUR household? Sigmund Freud probably smiles on the daily.

There was a bit too much ease in how she accessed information and pieced things together in the end and the thriller reader in me would have appreciated a different resolution. While there’s strong character development, there’s also stronger character regression before the rebuild and that was painful to observe.

Perfect. We rebuild.

Rating: 9/10