A review by jenean
The Wives by Simone Gorrindo

4.0

This one has been showing up on a lot of lists for new books and it looked good, so I picked it up at my library. (I kinda wished I had gotten the audio version, but was already well into reading it when that thought occurred and just stuck with print.) It was an honest, eye-opening, unvarnished picture of what it can really be like to be an Army wife. The author pulls no punches and does not try to sugarcoat her experiences as her boyfriend-turned-husband decides in his twenties that he wants to join the military, which was nothing that she expected their life would include. She details painfully the emotions that go along with giving up her career and life in New York to move to a small town in Georgia where she knows no one and, at first, isn’t even able to get around since she doesn’t have a license and can’t drive a car. Throughout the book, we feel all of her ups and downs in her relationships with herself, her husband, and the group of women (the titled “Wives”) who become her Army family.

One thing that frustrated me during much of the book was that it seemed so clear that the author was suffering from debilitating anxiety. And during a part of that time, she was under the care of a doctor whom she describes as attentive and caring, but never did it seem like anyone identified this condition in her or did anything about it. She herself understands that she has anxiety and has some mechanisms for dealing with it, but even with all of that, I was so frustrated to read about her struggles and was contemplating yelling at the book “GET HELP!” I’m glad she finally did, but feel awful that it took so long for her to get there.