Book #76 |
Book: My Father’s Wives | Author: Mike Greenberg | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Print |
Pages: 223 | Duration: 08/22/25 – 08/23/25 (2 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★☆☆ | Genres: fiction, family, relationships, psychology | ||
| 📕10-word summary: Man seeks insight from father’s 5 wives proceeding his mother. 🖌6-word review: Some plot points disjointed or missing. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Her hand on my knee meant she was doing exactly what she promised she would: lying with me, as opposed to me.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: lothario, scintilla | |||
| Description:* Jonathan Sweetwater has been blessed with money, a fulfilling career, great kids and Claire, his smart, gorgeous, sophisticated wife. But there is one thing Jonathan never had: a relationship with his father. Percival Sweetwater III has been absent from his son’s life since Jonathan was nine years old. A 5-term U.S. senator, now dead, Percy was beloved by presidents, his constituents, and women alike, especially the five women who married him after Jonathan’s mother. On a quest for understanding — about himself, about manhood, about marriage — Jonathan decides to track down his father’s five ex-wives. His journey will take him from cosmopolitan cities to the mile-high mountains to a tropical island—and ultimately back to confront the one thing Jonathan has that his father never did: home.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: The premise of this book interested me enough when I read about it in my BookBub.com email to check my library for its availability. There were two main story lines (i.e., wife’s possible infidelity and husband learning more about his dad to better understand himself) that I assumed would be intertwined or at least have some cause-and-effect with each other or something. I agree with these sentiments of another reader’s Goodreads review: “The writing is technically competent, but this is a very forgettable book that wavers somewhere between a mystery that isn’t, [a] Gary Stu having an angst-fest, and an attempt at a story about introspection in which the character never gets around to being introspective. In other words, it’s a lot of reasonably literate words that don’t seem to have much point behind them.” | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
