The Husbands is Holly Gramazio’s debut novel. I did not find it laugh-out-loud funny. Amusing at times, yes, but not funny because the premise of the novel sounds like a nightmare to me lol.

The Husbands is about a single English woman in her thirties, Lauren, who comes home late one night after attending her best friend’s hen do to find a strange man in her flat, a man who is apparently her husband, and she discovers that her life is slightly different from the life she had before she arrived home. While she is trying to process what is happening to her, the husband goes up in the attic to change a lightbulb, and then a different man comes out of the attic, and Lauren’s life has changed again.

Lauren quickly comes to the realization that she inexplicably has a “magic” attic that keeps producing a new husband every time the previous husband goes up in the attic. At first Lauren goes along with the idea that if she has a husband she does not like, or if her life or the lives of her family and friends change in the way she does not like, she can just send the husband up to the attic and swap him for a new husband and a new life. But having to deal with all these new men, and the number of husbands that Lauren ends up going through, does not sound fun to me.

The problem with The Husbands for me, though, is the character of Lauren. Every time she gets a new husband, she checks to see how her life has changed and how she has changed to adapt herself to the current husband, but we do not get a sense of who Lauren was before she found herself married, so she is hard to connect with. She comes across as picky and ungenerous as she cycles quickly through the husbands, and she eventually comes across as unhinged when she goes to extreme lengths to extricate herself from certain marriages she does not want to be in anymore in order to reset her life. But a way to look at Lauren is as a woman who was happily single and who suddenly finds herself in a marriage against her will, and who can’t get back to her original life. If she wants to be single again, she must pick a life that will work for her and then divorce the husband that comes with her life. Lauren’s situation is one that I would definitely not want to be in, so I can understand her desperation later in the novel.

Despite the flaws in how the main character is handled, I found myself racing through The Husbands as I was curious to see how things would end up for Lauren. I honestly don’t know what to think of the ending, but I guess it was the best ending that Lauren could hope for. The Husbands does not get too heavy (Lauren has a brief marriage to an abusive husband, but she gets rid of him quickly), so if you are looking for a light summer read, and if the idea of having an infinite number of husbands does not freak you out, then I recommend this novel.