Wifehouse (A captivating, sharply resonant novel about a mother who chooses to leave) - Sonya Walger

Je suis femme maison. You are a wifehouse? Oh, a housewife. Je suis une femme au foyer. Wow, that actually sounds worse in French. Lets go with je suis mre. He is drenched in youth, this young man, she thinks. He is soaked in all its possibilities. Annie and Hector have been hosting family friends in the guest house of their Connecticut home for many months. As a thank you, Annie is gifted French lessons with a twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. Hector, an actor, goes to Argentina to film on location, leaving Annie to single-parent their two kids. As life and the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen. Bookended by two Christmas lunches and told over the course of one year through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.