Book Review #9 : The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden

 

About the book:

Victoria Barnett has it all.

A great career as a nurse practitioner. A handsome and loving husband. A beautiful home in the suburbs and a plan to fill it with children. Life is perfect—or so it seems.

Then she’s in a terrible accident… and everything falls apart.

Now Victoria is unable to walk. She can’t feed or dress herself. She can’t even speak. She is confined to the top floor of her house with twenty-four-hour care.

Sylvia Robinson is hired by Victoria’s husband to help care for her. But it turns out Victoria isn’t as impaired as Sylvia was led to believe. There’s a story Victoria desperately wants to tell… if only she could get out the words.

Then Sylvia discovers Victoria’s diary hidden away in a drawer.

And what’s inside is shocking.

My Take:

Sylvia Robinson has hit a low in her life when she finds herself jobless, with hardly any savings, desperately looking for a job, her landlord threatening to throw her out, ex-boyfriend Freddy stalking her, when she meets the handsome and charming Adam Bernett. Adam offers her a dream job. The job of taking care of his wife Victoria, who is half-paralyzed and wheelchair-bound after a serious accident at home.

As Sylvia begins living in the big palace that Adam owns in Montauk, far away from Manhattan, almost inside the Atlantic ocean and starts caring for Victoria, she starts getting curious about Victoria and her life before the accident. When she gets the chance to read Victoria’s diary, secrets begin revealing themselves. The diary chronicles the transition of Victoria from a nurse practitioner in Manhattan to a stay-at-home wife of a New York Times bestseller celebrity novelist. The more Sylvia reads, the more intrigued she gets. Because what she reads in the diary is completely opposite of what she is witnessing around her. And then, Victoria begins giving her clues, as she desperately tries to tell her something.

The plot is very gripping, and even though a ‘diary’ is a somewhat commonly used concept especially in this genre, still this story stands out due to the way it unfolds. The narration alternates between Sylvia’s story and the diary of Victoria, making the read fast-paced and interesting. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger and even though we have a general idea of what to expect, we are left guessing and second-guessing right up to the end.

This is the second book of this author that I have read, and I would love to read more from her.

I rate it 4 stars.