Book Review: The Wife Maker by Karey White

Title: The Wife Maker (The Husband Maker #3)
Author: Karey White
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A clean read

When we last saw Charlotte and Angus, at the end of The Match Maker (the second book in Karey White's The Husband Maker series), Charlotte has finally realized that she's in love with Angus just in time for him to let her know that it's too late and they will never be a couple. In The Wife Maker, Angus moves from San Francisco to Kansas City for an orthopedic surgery residency/fellowship, and even though Charlotte's dream job, adoring family, and social life are all in the Bay Area, she takes a chance on love and follows him halfway across the country, despite his protestations.

In The Wife Maker, we finally hear Angus in his own voice (Angus and Charlotte take turns as the POV character). The two prior novels have been narrated entirely by Charlotte, and we as an audience could see her blindness to the fact that Angus was in love with her, even when she couldn't. Sometimes Charlotte was annoying in those first two books, and this time Angus has the opportunity to be annoying. If you've been in love with someone for a decade, and you haven't told her about your secret passion until a moment when you're both involved with other people, you can't blame her for taking a few weeks to think it over. And if you don't give her that time, or act like a sniveling baby when she comes back to you to tell you that she loves you too, then you're just being a brat. Angus continues to be a brat for most of The Wife Maker. If I hadn't liked him so much in the other books in the series, I would have been rooting for Charlotte to ditch his sorry self. As for Charlotte, she comes off pretty well in this book, although I really do think that most people would not be as up in arms if their daughter, a successful professional in her late twenties, decided to move out of the nest. Charlotte's mom seems to overreact a bit to the state of her life. (Maybe the fact that I moved to Belgium by myself when I was twenty and my parents didn't bat an eyelash colors my perspective, but thanks Mom and Dad, for knowing when not to hover). All of that said, I was very, very happy to see Angus eventually come to his senses. I would have rather seen a wedding as the way to end the book than the fast-forwarded career move that White gives us in her epilogue, but I would call The Wife Maker a successful, strong conclusion to the series. If there's a fourth book, please resist the urge to call it The Baby Maker, because that would just be gross. :)