Book Review: The Good Enough Husband

I received this book in exchange for a review as part of the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing. This romantic novel by Sylvie Fox features an almost 40 year old woman named Hannah on the cusp of making a big life decision. While en route from Orange County to her intended destination of Oregon, a case of puppy motion sickness forces her to stop in a small town along the California coast, where she meets town vet Ben. Ben is everything Hannah feels her life should be about, everything her current life is missing, except there's one little complication: Hannah has not yet told her husband that she wants a divorce and Ben is unaware that she is technically still married. Her decisions during this time end up affecting everyone and teaching them a thing or two about their families and making peace with those who have hurt them.

To be honest, I found Hannah to be selfish and quite cowardly for much of the book and I just couldn't find much sympathy for her. She created her own problems, way before meeting Ben, and she continued to create more problems and involve more people in them instead of making things right before moving on. So many of her problems could have been avoided by just putting everything out there, yet she chose not to. While I understood some of her decisions, like her reasons for getting married, I still thought she could have made smarter decisions. Instead of trying to save her marriage, she selfishly decided that because she was done, it was done too but neglected to tell Michael any of that. Michael was no saint and wasn't all that likable himself, but both he and Ben got the short end of the stick where Hannah was concerned. Despite knowing how badly Ben had been burned, both by his father and his ex-wife, Hannah continued to let her lies sit between them and chose to keep allowing him to believe that she was the only bit of honesty in his life. Instead of dealing with any of her problems head-on, Hannah ran from them. It took her hurting both Michael and Ben and getting pregnant before I saw substantial growth from her. Unfortunately, the book ended before we could see this growth really being put to use in her relationship with Ben. 

Despite the fact that I didn't really find any of the characters very likable, there were a number of things I enjoyed about the book. Firstly, I sort of enjoyed that I couldn't fully get behind any one character. Usually I don't like that, I want to find my sort of ally in the story, someone that I can get behind and root for. I couldn't do that with this book, but it worked for the content. It was real. Everyone was flawed, in a big way, and the reality of it is that that's how the world works. Most of us are flawed, in a big way. Nobody's perfect and many of us make insanely shitty decisions. Many of us shut down, preferring our judgments about others based on past experiences to keep us company instead of actual people, like Ben did. Many of us love the idea of something but aren't ready to really love it because we're too self-involved, like Michael. And many of us still end up making situations we're in worse before they get any better, like Hannah did. You could even push that to the extended family. Many of our grandmas (and grandpas) or hell maybe even parents stayed with their spouse after they cheated. Many of those who cheated ended up creating an illegitimate child. And many still will stay afterward, out of obligation like Ben's parents or because they realized they loved their spouse. Too many of us know people like Michael's parents, judgmental folks from 'the old days' who don't venture outside a circle of people who look, think and behave as they do. Hannah's problem, marrying out of loneliness/comfort rather than love, is a common one for women who seem to keep missing out on real love, so I couldn't fault her there. Hell, I've contemplated doing the same thing a time or two myself. I understand needing time to get away from the problem, my problem with that is that Hannah's mind was made up when she left and I think she should have explained that instead of running from it. Even though I didn't like many of her decisions and spent a lot of the time facepalming myself over them, sadly they too were pretty realistic. They were stupid as hell no doubt, but none of them were things I’d never heard before.  

I also liked that Hannah was half Black but it wasn't stereotypically weaved into the larger plot of the story. I appreciated that Ben and his family saw her, not her color. Most of the time when there's an interracial romance in novels, someone always mentions that "I prefer black women" or "I don't usually date black women" and I can't remember how many times I've been reading a book and one of the parents innocently comments, "Oh, so-and-so's never brought home a black man/woman before," as if it was some new toy and not a person. I also enjoyed that after awhile, Hannah finally came around and allowed herself to grow a little bit. I say ‘a little bit’ loosely because she continued to make ridiculously stupid decisions for almost the entire book. Unfortunately, that bit of growth came after she'd already hurt both Ben and Michael and ended up pregnant, but this proves that it's never too late to grow. Ben grew some as well; as much as Hannah's betrayal hurt him, I think it set the wheels in motion for him to look at his family situation in a new light and stop being so closed off. I won't say Michael grew per se because just as I was about to say that he had, he'd do something completely ridiculous and change my mind, but he did have moments in which he showed that he truly grasped what was going on.

There were a couple of spots in the book that could have used some continuity. In one scene towards the beginning, Hannah and Ben are in the car, but about a paragraph or two after setting the scene, Hannah's dipping her toe into some water. Now unless there's a leak in the footrest, I don't think there should be any water in the car. Throughout the book, Michael's stance on Hannah's singing changes a few times. He starts out in the book as being the one to have killed her dreams, saying they weren't practical. Later, he was the only one of his family who didn't think her dreams were dumb and made a grand gesture that made Hannah remember who she'd married, then he was back to not supporting her dreams. His stance changed depending on how he was supposed to be seen at that time, whether it was in a good or bad light. It wasn't consistent and I think this affected how I saw him overall, because at the end of it I wasn't quite sure what to make of him. I didn't like that we weren't able to see what came of Hannah and Ben; he came to her in Copenhagen but the events after their reunion are where the real work for their relationship would have kicked in. I would have liked to see that. Some of the scene changes as well as the ending felt rather rushed and this was a little jarring for me, but otherwise I'm glad I read this book. I like that it wasn't a perfect romance and didn't have this perfect neat little ending. I wish it wasn’t so rushed, but with such an imperfect situation there really was no way to end it neatly with the way everything unfolded without flipping the script entirely.

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