Book Review: The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls

Title: The Ninth Wife
Author: Amy Stolls
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: May 10, 2011
Paperback: 496 pages
ISBN: 978-0061851896
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

What sane woman would consider becoming any man’s ninth wife?

Bess Gray is a thirty-five-year-old folklorist and amateur martial artist living in Washington, DC. Just as she’s about to give up all hope of marriage, she meets Rory, a charming Irish musician, and they fall in love. But Rory is a man with a secret, which he confesses to Bess when he asks for her hand: He’s been married eight times before. Shocked, Bess embarks on a quest she feels she must undertake before she can give him an answer. With her bickering grandparents (married sixty-five years), her gay neighbor (himself a mystery), a shar-pei named Stella, and a mannequin named Peace, Bess sets out on a cross-country journey—unbeknownst to Rory—to seek out and question the wives who came before. What she discovers about her own past is far more than she bargained for.

The Ninth Wife is a smart, funny, eye-opening tale of love, marriage, and the power of stories to unlock the true meaning of home and family.

My Review:

The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls is a look at Bess Gray, a 35-year-old woman who falls in love with a 45-year-old man. The catch: He has been married eight times and to some people, a man looking for his ninth wife may put them off; certainly it is not entirely the fault of the previous eight Mrs. Rory McMillans.  Fortunately, Bess is clever enough to do some searching for answers before agreeing to become the ninth Mrs. Rory McMillan and her journey for answers yields more than even Bess bargained for.  Stolls tells the story in alternating narrative and the reader is introduced to a wide and diverse cast of characters.  I found myself enjoying Cricket and wishing I knew more about Millie and Irv Steinbloom and while I did not entirely relate well to the main characters, which is not necessarily a bad thing, I was hoping for more depth. With that said, Stolls has written an engaging book that will keep the reader interested and invested until the very end.  The Ninth Wife is a fairly long book, which I enjoy, but the page count is deceiving as the story moves at a very fast clip and I think The Ninth Wife would make for an excellent summer beach read.  I would recommend The Ninth Wife to anyone looking for a good book to escape into for a few hours.

About the Author:

Amy Stolls’s young adult novel Palms to the Ground was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and a Parents’ Choice Gold Award. She spent years as a journalist covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska before she received an MFA in creative writing from American University. Currently, she is the literature program officer for the National Endowment for the Arts, where she has worked since 1998, advising and collaborating with thousands of writers, translators, editors, booksellers, publishers, educators, and presenters nationwide to keep literature a vital part of American society. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two-year-old son.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the book tour.

I received a copy of The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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