Tuesday Teaser -- The Pretend Wife

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
This week I picked up The Pretend Wife by Bridget Asher. I can't remember why I was drawn to this book, but the book jacket says it's about imagining life with the one who got away. What if you had married someone else? How different would your life be? Here's the intro:

That summer when I first became Elliot Hull's pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that complicated things often prefer to masquerade as simple things at first. This is why they're so hard to avoid, or at least brace for. I should have know this -- it was built into my childhood. But I didn't see the complications of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didn't want to. So I didn't avoid them or even brace for them, and as a result, I eventually found myself in winter watching two grown men -- my pretend husband and my real husband -- wrestle on a front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snow -- such a blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldn't distinguish one man from the other. This would become one of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life, when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted line of smaller, seemingly simple turns.

 

This intro doesn't thrill me. I think I'm not drawn to introductions that summarize the story. I like to be pulled into the story instead.

 

 Also this week is Teaser Tuesdays.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!
Open to a random page of your current read and share a teaser sentence from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.
Here's mine from page 59:

But then Helen spoke up kind of slyly. "You need a pretend wife," she said, "for your mother's sake. It would be very gallant." She turned to me. "Gwen, you should be Elliot's pretend wife."

 

Hope you all have some books that I'm interested in.



First Paragraph -- The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
This week, I've dived into a book set in the same place as my new novel: Provence, France.
Anyone who reads my blog knows about my French obsession. I think I've read every fiction and memoir set in France and I'm always hungry for more, which is how I picked up The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher. The author also writes as Juliana Baggott and has a website here. Here are the first few short paragraphs in Part One:

Ever since Henry's death, I'd been losing things.
I lost keys, sunglasses, checkbooks. I lost a spatula and found it in the freezer, along with a bag of grated cheese.
I lost a note to Abbot's third-grade teacher explaining how I'd lost his homework.
I lost the caps to toothpaste and jelly jars. I put these things away open-mouthed, lidless, airing. I lost hairbrushes and shoes -- not just one of a pair, but both.

I've already finished Part One and am starting Part Two. I keep stealing moments to read this book, and not just because of my obsession with France. She hasn't even gotten to France in Part One. I'll share with you my favorite part so far. She touches on incidents that help explain her relationship with her husband Henry who died two years before in a car accident. They had one of those sweet, we-are-one relationships, or at least that's the way Heidi, the main character, remembers it. Here's my favorite scene so far:

One night, lying in bed together, about a month before Henry died, my calf seized. I shot up in bed and cried out, "Leg cramp!"
Henry was almost asleep. The room was lit only by the hall light. He said, "Your leg or mine?"
I was flexing my foot, rubbing the knot violently. "What do you mean, your leg or mine? How would I know if you had a leg cramp?"
Henry was quiet for a moment, and then said, "You're right. My leg feels fine."
The truth was that Henry and I had grown so close that sometimes it was hard to know where one of us began and the other ended. We'd been together for so long that most of our memories were the same film, just different camera angles, and from years of playing the memories, even the camera angles were mostly blurred to one by this point.

I told Grace about this scene this morning and we both ended up laughing. I'm not sure if I'd want a relationship like that. Earl and I are both definitely separate people, but that is easy for me to say since I still have him. Who knows what I would think if he one day disappeared.
I'm definitely going to keep reading this book. What do you think? Did it hook you?