Even in seemingly perfect cookie-cutter neighborhoods, things can go terribly wrong...
At 23 years old, it seems like Jane has just won the lottery.
After years of trying to make ends meet in her drab, gray apartment in Birmingham, Alabama, life seems like a bleak, hopeless ride. Jane works as a dog walker for the rich inhabitants of Thornfield Estates—a neighborhood full of McMansions, bored housewives, and lawns glistening emerald green every time of the year—getting enough money by stealing whatever jewelry she can get her hands on.
But everything changes when she runs into (or technically is run-over by) the rich, handsome, and charming Eddie Rochester.
For Jane, Eddie is like a pile of gold. He can give her both the safety and the lifestyle she’s always wanted, and she ends up catching feelings for him as well. But Eddie has a mysterious past. He’s newly widowed; his wife, Bea, drowned in a boating accident with her best friend Blanche.
But did they really drown… and are they even dead?
As the name Jane might allude to, The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins is a snappy, fast-paced retelling of the gothic classic Jane Eyre. When I finished reading The Wife Upstairs, I was torn between giving it 5 stars and 2 stars. On one hand, it’s nearly a brilliant masterpiece with exquisite writing that I could not stop reading. On the other, there were plot holes, annoying stereotypes, and far too many swear words. In the end, I ended up giving it 3.5 stars.
The Wife Upstairs is still a good guilty-pleasure page-turning read—but you should brace yourself for its problems.
One thing that’s relatively unique to the book is that all the characters are what you’d consider “bad people.” We have a stealing, gold-digging main character; snobby, gossiping housewives; and manipulative love interests. Hawkins clearly doesn’t give the reader much to root for character-wise, but that somehow makes the story even better. I loved finally reading a book where the main character isn’t a goody-two-shoes or someone built for the reader to sympathize with. In my opinion, morally gray characters make for a much more intriguing read, and Hawkins definitely delivers.
For example, take the moment when Eddie confronts Jane about Bea’s death, and Jane thinks, “I’m glad that Bea Rochester was on the boat with Blanche Ingraham that night. I’m glad because it means that Eddie is alone.
Free.
The fact he sees that in me should make me feel ashamed, but it only makes me giddy.”
And even if you don’t follow the book for the characters, you’ll definitely follow it for the plot—which isn’t perfect, but the way Hawkins writes it is; her cliff-hangers and addictive prose make the pages practically turn by themselves.
The writing was probably the highlight of the book. Hawkins’s writing walks the line between being overly descriptive and dry perfectly, never slipping and falling off into one realm. Her sentences flow like a melody; there are no shabby transitions and she uses line-breaks with breathtaking intentionality. The book is practically a literary heaven.
And what Hawkins truly deserves is a gold medal for her cliffhangers. Each chapter leaves you begging for more in a way I haven’t seen a writer do before. Take the end of the first chapter:
“I hear the car before I see it, but even then, I don’t move, and later, I’d look back at that moment and wonder if I somehow knew what was going to happen.
If everything in my life had been leading me to that one spot, to that one house.
To him.”
Moments like these were the perfect bait to hook me into the novel.
But despite the beauty of her writing, I found one irritating flaw: the swearing. While important to some conversations, getting flavorful swear words on almost every page felt overwhelming. It honestly detracted from the book.
Beyond that, I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about the ending. I won’t spell it out for spoiler reasons, what I will say is that it was definitely in a moral gray-zone, which, while perhaps fitting for the characters, bothered me in terms of character growth. I thought that Jane’s character would take a different path and develop more than it did. What I did like about the end, though, is that we never know the full story.
You end the book with just enough meat to feel like you got a satisfying close, but there’s still some missing pieces that will make you grapple with what happened in the book for days.
In that respect, it’s genius. But other things were decidedly not “genius.”
Firstly, there is the rich vs poor dichotomy that started out strong, but then got so overused that it just became downright unrealistic. I like that the book isn’t just about a mystery, but also about socioeconomic disparity and wealth. But while that theme had enormous potential, it fell short.
In Thornfield Estates, all the wealthy owners just leave all of their belongings everywhere. We see diamond earrings, golden bangles, a Burberry jacket, a precious ring, silver dog-collars, and more just being left out in the entryway like forgotten flecks of dust. Yes, these people are rich, but would anyone really just leave thousands of dollars worth of jewelry in the entryway? On the edges of tables? And not just one person, but an entire neighborhood of people?
All of that felt unrealistic, and, seeing as it wasn’t even that important to the book, I wondered why Hawkins had included it at all. In a similar vein, the “housewife” stereotype—yoga pants, gossip, wine in the morning, afternoon, and night—bothered me. Although it was a touch more realistic than the jewelry-strewn houses, it felt like something straight out of a corny TV show and I wished Hawkins could have given more depth to those characters.
Lastly, what perhaps bothered me the most was the gaping plot hole. Don’t get me wrong, I still really enjoyed the overall plot—it was fast-paced, well-crafted, and my mouth dropped at one point—but a key detail doesn’t make any sense. I can’t give away too much for spoiler reasons, but the plot involves a panic room, which is supposed to be locked from the inside. A lot of events in the book make no sense when you consider this—the door would have to be open the whole time, which is downright impossible.
Ultimately, the flaws of the book knocked one and a half stars off of the five star rating, but definitely not 3. The Wife Upstairs is a bit messy at times, and I undoubtedly would have had some criticism had I been the book’s editor, but it was still a thrilling read that I had trouble putting down.
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