Book Review (full of regret)

Title: The Husband's Dilemma: Stories
Author: Nicole Stansbury

Review: This was hit-or-miss. There were no outstandingly fantastic stories that I just adored. There were none that I particularly hated. Most of them were something slightly more interesting than nothing at all. It took forever for me to get through this 200-page book. I guess I had wanted it to be scathing or vitriolic or cathartic. It was just…depressing. Several of the stories were about a Woman Who Has Everything (i.e. a husband or boyfriend who works and provides for both or all of them while she stays home and cares for the house), whining about everything else that she wants, contemplating how she can acquire the rest of what she wants. Quite a few involve women so freaky and irritating that it’s no wonder that their paper-thin spouses were driven to smack them around. But why develop and encourage such characters? Why create something so abhorrent, so stereotypical, and that contributes so much to the perpetuation of negative behavior?
    This was a frustrating, eventually irritating book for me. I shouldn’t have bothered to finish it, but it’s steadily becoming clearer that I don’t have the fortitude to bail out even for my own safety and happiness. It wasn’t worth my bothering.
Rating: 5. I borrowed it from the library because I was incredibly grumpy and disaffected when it came through the pipeline and it seemed to match my mood perfectly. And the cover art is cool (woman in wedding dress and pink rubber gloves standing at a sink washing dishes). But it's definitely not anything I'd want to look at again.