"A Reliable Wife" Robert Goolrick

It is the early 1900's and Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman in a small town, has it all. He has everything except for a wife so he advertises in the paper for a "reliable wife"- someone who will live with him and provide him with companionship, with no expectation of love ever developing. Out of all of the replies that he receives he chooses to marry Catherine Land. Their new relationship starts out on the wrong foot, though, as she sends him a picture of her cousin India instead of herself, fearing that her natural beauty will scare him off. When she gets off of the train in his small town in Wisconsin he is appalled that he has been lied to and is determined to send her back the way which she has come. In a turn of events, Truitt finds himself falling in love with her and getting used to her gentle companionship. Although he comes to discover that she is not the woman that she has presented herself to be, he finds that sometimes love alone is enough to overcome these obstacles.

I enjoyed this book. It really is one of those books that you pick up and can't put down. The story flows from page to page, and as the plot deepens you find yourself unable to wait to find out what happens in the end. I found the plot twists to be quite predictable (the first one I had figured out quite early in the book) but perhaps this was what the author had intended. This book was full of deceptions and lies, with everything not exactly as it seems. In the end we learn that the events that have occurred in a person's past don't definitively shape what their future becomes.

For more on this book you can browse inside it here. Thanks to HarperCollins Canada for this review copy.