Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

Thanks to those who are sticking with me through this website hosting shift! Hopefully you received this in your inbox as usual, but if not, you can subscribe to my blog using the subscribe form on the right hand toolbars of my blog posts; just type in your info and hit the pink ‘subscribe to blog’ button!

What would you do if you came home after a fun night of drinking with your girlfriends, only to find your sweet husband waiting up for you – but you don’t have a husband? And what if this brand new guy doesn’t suit your tastes anyway? Not to worry, every time he heads up into the attic, a different husband climbs down the ladder ready to take his place. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio is a debut novel that explores this most unique idea – parallel lives that can shift by simply sending one man up a ladder into an attic. But like the dating apps of today, sometimes too much choice is never as good as it seems!

Plot Summary

Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, very drunk, after her friend’s bachelorette party; but there is a man waiting for her in her apartment, and he’s claiming to be her husband. Lauren has never had a husband, really, has only had one serious relationship that ended awhile ago, but this man seems really nice, and when she looks through her phone she sees photos of them together, so she goes to sleep hoping it will be better in the morning. It isn’t. He’s still there, and as she outwardly pretends this is normal, she’s internally freaking out, and begins quizzing her family, friends and neighbors as to what her current life looks like. It’s very similar to her ‘old’ life, with small differences. But when her husband heads up into the attic, a brief flash of light and a buzzing sound accompanies a different man climbing down the ladder, also claiming to be her husband. And every time a ‘husband’ heads back up there, a different man comes down, always married to Lauren, but always different. Lauren’s life shifts along with these husbands; in one she’s filthy rich, in another she works at a hardware store, in another she regularly engages in threesomes with her neighbors downstairs. She quickly grows bored and agitated with these life switches, at one point deciding to travel away from her flat and magical attic, to seek out a previous husband who lives in North America. Her desperation then reaches a dangerous point when she dabbles in illegal activities to get a disappointing husband back up into the attic.

My Thoughts

Although this book has a very sci-fi hook to it, it lands squarely in the category of literary fiction, with a twist of humour. You don’t even have to read the book itself to know it’s going to be funny; the author’s acknowledgments made me chuckle. Aside from the strange powers this attic possesses, there is nothing else weird, or fantasy-like about this story. Once you accept that new husbands come down from the attic, everything else becomes matter-of-fact. Rather than trying to determine why this is happening, Lauren focuses on getting her choices right. The book is an exploration of what it would truly feel like if you had endless choice: the good and the bad of it.

Much of the book’s humour comes from Lauren’s observations about marriage, as she has a very unique perspective on it; she’s being plopped into a serious relationship with no lead-up, which is definitely the most entertaining part of the book:

“It gets colder and colder but the occasional sunlit hour allows her to believe that there are more warm days to come, and anyway, she’s finding the cold-weather husbands easier to love. She likes cosy. Hot chocolates. Movies on the sofa. Men in cardigans or scarves, like big teddy bears, encumbered, adorable. In summer the husbands dressed worse, they smelled more, they were more often drunk (to be fair, so was she), they barbecued things ineptly or embarked on small-scale DIY and abandoned it halfway through. For these autumnal husbands, she feels affection more easily.”

(p. 161 of The Husbands, ARC edition)

To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal if Lauren figures out what exactly or why this is happening to her, as this is part of the fun. After every husband heads back upstairs, there’s the suspense of seeing what will come down, and again the suspense to see how long he lasts. This book really nails the balance between entertainment and thoughtfulness; you’ll turn the pages because it’s a great plot, but you’ll be thinking about ‘what it all means’ well after you finish.