Book review: The Replacement Wife

1 star for The Replacement Wife by Rowena Wiseman

Amazon (US)
Luisa has met the love of her life ... now she just needs to figure out what to do with her husband. 
Luisa has fallen madly in love with sculptor Jarvis, so she comes up with a plan to find a new wife for her husband Luke so she can exit stage left. She wants to screen potential stepmothers for her 8-year-old son Max and has strict criteria: the woman must be a single mother; have no more than two children; she can't be authoritarian; she must be creative, nurturing and not much prettier than Luisa. 
After a few carefully orchestrated meetings with different women that fail to raise a spark, Luke finally connects with a potential replacement wife. However, Luisa isn't prepared for the fact that Luke's interest in the other woman makes him a better man and a more attractive husband. After suffering for years in a half-dead marriage, Luisa starts to remember what it was about Luke that she originally fell in love with. But is it too late? 
Source: Goodreads

I was kindly given a review copy through Netgalley, with many thanks to the publishers.

The idea of this story sounded so great! I felt like I was in for a funny read with an interesting new take, but I'm almost sad to say that I wasn't blown away.


Luisa falls in love with Jarvis, her brother's friend and old crush. Against all odds, it turns out that her own feelings are reciprocated by Jarvis. With this new, exciting love in her life, she realizes how bored she's been in her current marriage. Her husband Luke and herself have become too domestic.
She feels like she's stuck in a rut and that the only light in her marriage is their son Max.

Luisa wants out but she wants a safe escape. If her husband also falls for someone else then they have the perfect reason to separate. Luisa is now on the search for the perfect girlfriend for Luke, and stepmother for her son Max.

As time goes on Luisa will find that things shouldn't always be taken for granted.



When your main character considers committing adultery, then you have to make sure that your readers are picking her side. They have to feel what she feels - trapped in a marriage, the love/passion for this new man, etc.. You have to make them feel like picking her side, to route for her and, maybe even, be able to relate to her. You have to make her likable.

But everything about Luisa annoyed me. She was incredibly self-centered.
Me, me, me, me, me; that's all that seemed to be happening. Whenever she started thinking about other people's well-being, she still turned it around to be about her.


The idea of Luisa trying to find the perfect new wife for her husband had sounded interesting and funny to me but in fact it turned out to be frustrating. It was very superficial and rushed. Luisa had set certain standards for the woman she was looking for, with Max and Luke's best interests in mind. But in the end what it really came down to was that, in reality, they just had to live up to her own expectations.

When she finally finds a woman that seems good enough, she starts changing her mind the moment she finds that her plan is working, starts second guessing her own actions. She is in constant doubt but not the kind of doubt you'd want to read about. Can her new love give all the luxury she's currently experiencing? Can he live up to her expectations and what she imagines of this new love to be like? And whenever something that she had planned does happen, she turns 180° and wants the opposite to happen.


Which brings me to another point of trouble. The love between Luisa and Jarvis.
What was described as love and falling in love head over heels really just felt like infatuation. Nothing about their love seemed to make any sense or feel real. And I think that was one of the core problems. As a reader you need to feel what the character feels so that you have an understanding of why she makes her decisions. You need to understand the underlying thoughts and feelings that come with going through drastic measures, etc.

I often comment on how I find books being too slow, not having the right pace. This book was the exact opposite, it was like a high speed train, rushing through the entire (first half of the) book. Speeding through key moments that would've made it possible for the reader to relate to Luisa more. I personally would've loved reading more about conversations between Luisa and Jarvis when they were together and the feelings that it roused with her. I needed more information about her mind-set, her troubled feelings about her husband (and not just feeling sexually let down), and her reasoning to think of the plan to find a replacement wife.
But all this was rushed. It was told very matter-of-fact way, almost like telling someone what you had for breakfast over a cup of coffee.

Maybe my expectations of this book were clouding the story that I ended up reading.
Or maybe, just maybe, I didn't understand what the author was trying to convey, but it couldn't charm me.



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