1.5 Stars (outliner)

Cassie Edwards had enough. She’d given up on love. But then, Jamie walked into her life, and everything was roses and sunshine. Less than a month before her wedding, Cassie finds out Jamie is cheating on her with his colleague. She is devastated but needs to know more. As she digs deeper, Cassie finds out that Jamie spun a lot of lies. 

She wants to destroy him. But what if he destroys her before she gets her chance to escape? 

The story comes in Cassie’s first-person POV. 

The positive is that I could clear an ARC from my NetGalley backlog. The cover is pretty good even if the title doesn’t fit the story. 

The book starts with a snippet from the climax (The Ending) and takes us to the past to provide the whole story. There was quite a bit of feminist rage in the first chapter. I thought the emotion would rule the plot. Alas! 

I like revenge stories. I like revenge when it is cold, calculated, and planned to perfection. This requires a good head on the shoulders and a solid brain with functional grey cells. And most importantly, it requires a level of detachment and chilliness. 

What do we get in Cassie? A bumbling mess with no idea about anything, vomiting at the slightest hint of upsetting news, drinking bottles of alcohol, and with non-existent self-preservation. Is it any surprise that her barely baked plan ended up the way it did? I’m shocked she managed to be alive! 

Jamie’s character is a joke. No kidding. He is supposed to be one of those narcissistic incels but ends up as a cardboard copy of it. Even the posts sound so juvenile when they are supposed to make us angry. 

The narration is slower than the snail’s pace. I was bored of all that repetition by Cassie and started to speed-read. Somehow, that didn’t help much either. I am just as annoyed except that I saved a day or two. The book is way too long (~350 pages but reads much longer). It should have been wrapped up much earlier. 

I don’t even want to talk about the ending. Was it supposed to be ‘realistic’ or some sort of social commentary? I see it at neither. Just a badly executed twist I could see almost immediately. Still, I hoped things would get better because of the strong women tones but nope. They only got worse. I’m not even a feminist but the ending felt like a slap in the face of women. 

I’m sorry. I tried to find something good in the book. I don’t give one star often (very rare) but I can’t find anything much to make note of. 

To summarize, How to Destroy Your Husband is your book if you want to know what NOT to do to take revenge on your partner. 

Thank you, NetGalley and Kingsley Publishers, for eARC. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. 

#NetGalley