Bold, ballsy, and irreverent author Marilyn Simon Rothstein hits it out of the park with her tickler, Husbands and Other Sharp Objects. Peppered with indelible wit, pungent dialogue, colorful deliciously flawed madcap, characters, Rothstein’s new novel celebrates the wisdom of “older women”, the bonds of friendship, a wedding from hell, and the promise of love after divorce.
Marcy Hammer, fifty six, has always been a “shmateh” a spineless pushover, a wuss in her thirty year marriage to ‘bigger than life’ husband Harvey Hammer, successful proprietor of a lingerie empire, Bountiful Bosoms. Marcy’s mantra “All my life was Harvey“ came to a grinding halt when Harvey announced the imminent delivery of healthy “Baby Oops” with a twenty something 32DD model at Bountiful.
When bottles of wine, boxes of Pringles, an American Express credit card, a handful of Prozac pills failed to comfort her, Marcy turned to her two best buds, experts at coping with toxic marital strife. The elegant, soft spoken Candy, who was just healing from a hysterectomy and a separation from a physician husband known around the hospital as “Dr. Bang” Candy. The other “expert” is the pragmatic narcissistic Dana, ”a blond Cher” ecstatic with her third husband Calvin. But Marcy did not take Dana’s advice to rush and find a “ballbuster divorce lawyer” and leave her Teflon hubby, but wishes for a reunion.
To find relief from her tsuris, Marcy volunteers at the Guild for Good and dates co-volunteer Jon who happens to makes great omelets from organic cage free eggs and recites from memory the first line of classic novels. But Jon was not her Harvey. Amid Marcy’s personal turmoil headstrong daughter Amanda announces her engagement to Jake Berger, her husband Harvey’s young lawyer. Marcy summons all her coping resources to balance the tangled imbroglio of a divorce and organizing Amanda’s destination wedding at a seascape resort in Florida. The wedding would include Marcy’s philandering hubby.
Ever accommodating and accepting, nothing prepared Marcy for the meeting with her new machatonim. It seems that the machataynisteh (mother in law) is wearing Marcy’s diamond earrings which Marcy left in her hotel room. Is Amanda’s new mother-in-law a “ganeff” a kleptomaniac? And where has Harvey disappeared on the day of his daughter’s wedding? Can Marcy pull it all together or just accept two tickets to join her friend Jon in Japan.
Husbands and Other Sharp Objects is a bouquet to women and renewed love. Gleefully funny.
