The Ninth Wife

As the story of a thirty-five year old woman living on her own in a city, ready to give up on finding true and lasting love, The Ninth Wife sounds like many “chick lit” fiction options out there. In the hands of author Amy Stolls, though, this tale quickly distinguishes itself from other pieces for both its character development and the development of an outrageous history of relationships and marriage. As the title suggests, eight of them, in fact.

Bess Gray may fear she lives up to her bland last name, but she clearly cannot see her multitude of strengths for what they are– kindness and compassion for others, self-sufficiency and a drive for new experiences. Instead, she feels like the embodiment of a stereotype, and begins to resign herself to a life of being single. So when she meets Rory, an attractive forty-something year old man with an Irish accent and a mischievous sense of humor, she finds herself wondering if he could be “the one.” The attraction is immediate, and the courtship that follows begins as lighthearted, but soon turns more serious.

With her feelings already quite secure, Rory’s previous marriages come to light, and Bess is left shaken and questioning everything she thought she knew about Rory, and about love. Meanwhile, the people who make up her family, her grandparents and her neighbor Cricket, all seem to be experiencing their own love-related turmoils, leaving Bess even more insecure and unsure about what love and marriage can ever truly be. She decides to approach her questions about love as she does in her work as a folklorist– research and interviews. Oh yes, she’s going to find the eight women who said “I do” to Rory before she can make any decision about their future together.

I found this to be a quirky version of the lonely 30-something year old woman looking for love, and it immediately had me hooked. There was a certain level of foreshadowing that made some aspects of the story predictable, but I wasn’t bothered by it at all simply because of the likability of the main characters. Interestingly enough, even after eight “failed” marriages, Rory continued to elicit compassion, and in the chapters in which he tells the story of each marriage, he becomes even more realistic and multi-layered.

Love may be a typical theme for women’s fiction, but in The Ninth Wife, the exploration of this theme is anything but typical. Readers are compelled to question their own perceptions of relationships that make it and of those that end, and I predict that most readers will be wondering if they could marry a man with eight marriages already under his belt. I was surprised at my own conclusions by the novel’s end.

Dawn is the first wife to her first husband, and after 13 years of marriage, she has no plans on changing anything. She blogs at my thoughts exactly.