Review: The Adulterer's Handbook by Sam Anthony
Note: this review is mostly spoiler free, but if you really want to go into the book totally blind, stop reading now. Come read this once you've read the book.
I need to start off by saying that I never thought I'd read a book like this. I'm happily married, and I think cheating is one of the worst things you can do to a person you supposedly love. If I had seen this in a bookstore, I might have glanced at it and read the back (because let's face it, the cover is well done and intriguing), but I certainly wouldn't have bought it.
So what changed? On twitter, where I discovered this book initially, there was mention of a serial killer in one of the sequels.
Murder is just fine by me, apparently.
What can I say? I'm a crime junkie.
So, now that my curiousity was engaged, I grabbed a copy of the first book for Kindle. It sat there in my kindle library, waiting for me to finally open it and discover its contents, for longer than I'd like to admit.
Finally, I gave it a chance, and I was hooked right from the prologue.
I read the whole thing, all 300 some pages, in a day. That's not an easy feat when you have a toddler running around, but I managed it. I had to. I just couldn't stop reading. It really is that captivating.
It was so easy to get sucked into Lee's - the narrator - head. His imagination is sometimes wild, and usually hilarious. (As mentioned before, I'm married, so I particularly enjoyed the imagined conversations with his wife that almost always have her asking if he took garbage out before she answers whatever question he had.) Author Sam Anthony does a fantastic job at breaking down Lee's thought process. He's really not a person you want to root for, but he is charming and you can't help but like him on some level. He spends the entire novel cheating on his wife and trying to justify it to himself, and yet you're still crushed for him near the end.
Sophia, his affair partner, is a different story. She's fun enough at first, but as her true colours begin to come to light, I as the reader became increasingly anxious when she was around. That anxiety builds as Lee begins to see the true her as well. At some point, you just want to shake Lee in frustration and yell, “You absolute idiot! She's no good!”
It's funny; once she's (seemingly) out of his life, I felt more relaxed. Even with the increased police presence.
The writing style is as charming as Lee. It's told in first person, present tense, with digressions and tangents into Lee's mind and imagination. That's incredibly hard to pull off as an author. Most of the time, it's not going to work and you're going to be left with a hot mess of a story. Sam Anthony is the exception and nails it.
If it's not already clear, I loved this book. And the sequel, The Adulterer's Confession, is written entirely in dialogue. That's also incredibly hard to pull off! I wrote a short story (that's out there somewhere on the internet under a pen name and is hopefully buried for all time) entirely in dialogue. You have to consider every line so carefully, and yet make it natural. Based on the preview, I'm certain that Sam Anthony will make it work.
Really, my only complaint about the book is the ending. It felt too much like the end of a chapter rather than the end of the book, even with the epilogue. Logically, it made sense to end the book there, with Lee's life being turned upside down in a delicious turn of karma. I really don't know how else I'd end it if I were the author. I just know that I was left wanting something more, but I have no idea what more looks like. Maybe the sequel will give me the closure and change my opinion, but at this time I haven't read it yet.
Overall, it's a masterpiece of a first (!!!) novel, and I highly recommend checking the series out.
9/10: -1 because I just couldn't reconcile the ending.