The world of The Husbands feels systematically built like a game would be and our main character, Lauren, drunk both literally and on her newfound Husband Gacha powers, reacts to her husband exchanging magic attic as if she were a player in a video game.

Once she’s gotten settled into this new magical reality of hers, she begins to poke and prod at the attic to find out how it interacts with the husbands it “makes” for her and how it changes the rest of her life outside of her home and husband. Gradually, she figures out how to leverage the attic’s power to her advantage, using it to help her find her ideal husband and her ideal self.

Importantly, each husband comes bundled with a multiverse version of reality in which Lauren met and married said husband. Whenever a new husband comes out of the attic Lauren finds herself in a changed world where her job, her relationships and her body are different than the ones she had before.

This attic provides Lauren with the means to play out various “what ifs” with these husbands and the other lives attached to each of them.

Eventually, she gets tired of this meaningless rat race-like game she’s been playing for far too long, swiping her way through hundreds of husbands.

The meaninglessness Lauren feels is caused by her being the only person in her life who remembers with any kind of permanence what she’s been through (and with whom) and with each reset even her capacity to retain the memories of her past lives degrades.

Lauren comes to the realization that her self is constructed and given meaning in large part by the relationships she fosters in her life and by resetting these with every attic-ing she’s killing a part of herself and not really living the way she should.

So, Lauren chooses to end this farce and live a real life by burning the attic to the ground — forcing herself to live out the rest of her days with the last husband the attic produces for her in whatever reasonable version of reality he comes with.

In other words, she puts the controller away and chooses to live her life instead of continuously escaping into others.

The themes of this novel are simple, innoffensive and effectively delivered: escapism is bad, live in the moment, seize the day, etc. We’ve all heard these imperative statements about how to live a good life a million times, they’re understandable but are hard to always live by in practice.

But not every novel has to be the philosophical masterpiece of the century, in the Husbands, Gramazio has gotten her comedy down to a science and that’s just as impressive to me, perhaps even more so because of how hard writing a funny book seems to be.

I cannot stress how funny the Husbands is… Watching Gramazio use Lauren as a very likeable mouthpiece to unleash peak British-y, sarcastic and dry humor page after page while having the majority of the jokes land is an experience unlike any other I’ve had reading a novel in recent memory.

But, the Husbands isn’t perfect but its strengths more than make up for it failings.

One of which is the ending which feels a little rushed. It’s way too tidy and predictable for my tastes. In the afterword, Gramazio reveals that her first draft had three endings. I interpret this to mean that The Husbands was some sort of limited Choose Your Own Adventure novel initially which might explain why the leadup to the ending felt a little undercooked.

The Husbands feels like a much more lighthearted riff on time loop stories like the First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Tonally, it’s more in line with something like Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale (Hollys rise up!). If you liked any of these books, you’ll probably get a kick out of the other two!