Let’s Divorce. Mrs. Wright Is Done Playing Nice review

First-impressions review: based on the free opening chapters (1–3) and the official synopsis. We will update the score once we have read further.

Some divorce dramas take ten chapters to reach the word “divorce”. Let’s Divorce. Mrs. Wright Is Done Playing Nice. gets there before the end of chapter one, and it has earned it by then.

Two births in one hospital

The opening is brutal and efficient. Stella Rowan is lying in a hospital bed, about to undergo an emergency procedure after a miscarriage, and calls her husband, Evan Wright. He calls her dramatic. Then a voice on his end of the line announces that the C-section went well: twins, a boy and a girl. Evan is in the same hospital, with his sister-in-law Summer Bailey. The doctor asks whether her husband will be there afterwards. Stella signs the form herself.

The backstory arrives in pieces. Evan’s older brother Steven died in a plane crash six months ago, and since then one call about Summer has been enough to pull Evan away from anything. Earlier that day, at a family lunch at the Wright estate, Summer went into labour and shoved Stella to the floor. Stella grabbed Evan’s trouser leg and told him her stomach hurt. He gave her a look that said “stop it” and carried Summer out.

The dining table goes over

The scene that sells the book comes that evening. Evan sits down, lights a cigarette, and gently tells Stella how adorable the twins are. She slaps him and says one word: divorce. When her mother-in-law, Dora Lowe, orders her to bring Summer chicken soup at the hospital in the morning, Stella flips the entire dining table. In chapter two she points out that she cannot even cook, so the request was Summer’s way of making a point. She then reveals that she lost a baby two years ago after Summer ran her car into her. From now on she calls Dora “Mrs. Wright”. It is loud, angry and very satisfying.

Then she burns, in the rain, everything she ever bought Evan and everything he bought her, and her best friend Jennifer Tanner drives her away. Jennifer is the warmest character in the opening, and her phone call with Evan in chapter three, asking whether Summer sees him as Steven or wants a stand-in husband, says aloud what the reader has been thinking.

A heroine with a plan

What lifts it above a simple shouting match is that Stella was already prepared. She bought an apartment at Azure Heights on Starlake Avenue in the second month after Steven died. She is already asking about the export business of Summer’s wealthy mother, Ruby Bailey. And chapter three ends with a sharp discovery: the Redcrest Valley tourism design Stella lost in a competition three years ago has just launched, credited to “Lead Designer: Summer Bailey”.

What could be better

Evan and Dora are one-note so far, and Summer appears only in flashbacks and other people’s accounts, so she is a pure villain for now. Some of the translation is stiff, and certain lines are repeated almost word for word within a page. Stella’s rage is satisfying, but the story will need more shades than anger to sustain 1,253 chapters, and it is still ongoing. We left the reader score off because there are only three ratings so far.

Who should read it

If you want a wife who stops apologising in chapter one and starts planning in chapter two, and you can handle a heavy pregnancy-loss opening, this is a strong, angry start to a long revenge drama.