Hausfrau

Author: Jill Alexander Essbaum
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2015
Pages: 368
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning.

Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
 
But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
 
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.

Review: I'll start this off by saying, nothing about this reminded me of Girl on a Train, and I actually find it weird that it was even mentioned. I haven't read The Woman Upstairs.

This book was recommended by my coworker who has given me excellent recommendations in the past. This one though was a fail. I didn't enjoy it, and I'm pretty sure that had I been reading the paper version, I would have returned it to the library after the second or third chapters. However, I had the audio version and for whatever reason just kept going ahead with it.

The plot was boring and Anna was an unlikable character. I don't mind insinuated sex or a few details, but this was too much and turned me off from the book as a whole. Pardon the pun.

From the beginning you just knew it isn't going to end well for Anna, and the author's closing paragraph was the best part of the book (and not just because it was over). The chosen closing words were brilliant. 

The author can write; this just wasn't my cup of tea as a whole.