The Husbands by Chandler Baker

 

Most women would envy Nora Spangler.  She is a successful attorney with a loving husband, a software designer.  The couple have a young daughter and Nora is pregnant with their second child.  They are looking for a new house as their family expands.  

But Nora doesn't necessarily feel like someone who others should envy.  She has all that but it seems like she is always running a hundred miles an hour to keep all the parts of her life going.  She works long hours but still there is a suggestion at her law firm that she should be able to drop everything and work late or on weekends whenever the firm finds it necessary, which is often.  Her daughter loves her school but school means monitoring projects, packing lunches, making sure there is a new cute outfit ready each day.  The house still has to be cleaned, laundry has to be done, cooking the meals and cleaning up is a daily chore and then there are the other items such as grocery shopping, doctors' visits, dentist, playdates, birthday parties, school trips and parties.  The list goes on and on.  Dylan would say he helps and he does but the responsibility falls mainly on Nora.

The couple finds a great house in a subdivision called Dynasty Ranch.  The house is great but Nora is even more impressed with the women she meets from the neighborhood.  They are all highly successful, doctors, CEOs, and other professionals.  Yet they seem calm and happy and they all have highly supportive husbands who take on an equal share of the second shit work if not the majority of it.  Nora wonders how did they come to this arrangement?  As she gets to know the women better, she realizes that this lifestyle is the one she wants.  Or is it?  

Chandler Baker has written a story that reverses the well known book, The Stepford Wives.  The tension in the book builds slowly, from Nora meeting the other women to envying them to finally fearing them.  Baker taps into the resentment that most married women with families feel; that they are shouldering the majority of the household work while men come home to relax, and that something needs to change in their lives.  Many readers will be surprised at the book's ending and final twists.  This book is recommended for thriller readers.