Review: Pondering the road less traveled in novel ‘The Other Wife’

Fiction: The debut is a subtle exploration of marital restlessness, even amidst seeming freedom.

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
July 8, 2025 at 4:00PM
photo of author Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
The debut novel of Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, who sometimes reviews books for the Star Tribune, digs into the wounds of societal discomfort. (Kelly Shimoda/Riverhead)

The rearview mirror. The backward glance. The woulda, coulda, shouldas. We reach a certain point in life and think: Is this it? Maybe we look back on paths we might have taken, loves that got away. Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s debut novel, “The Other Wife,” mines this restlessness.

After three glasses of Riesling and a hot shower, 37-year-old Zuzu texts her college crush. It’s a simple message sent from a place of boredom and anonymity: “how much do you miss me, scale of 1-10” she asks James Cashel, or Cash, whose wife is almost as busy as Zuzu’s. A witty text exchange ensues between the former college pals. Sparks rekindle, and Thomas-Kennedy’s story takes off into a vividly rendered world, ringed with rue.

Having failed the bar exam twice, Zuzu is by default the domestic side of a would-be power couple. Her wife, Agnes, a high-powered lawyer who is captive to billable hours, often comes home late and is rarely off her phone. While Zuzu cooks, cleans, quizzes their toddler son on dinosaur facts and takes him to play groups and parks, Agnes misses dinners, forgets to pay bills and leaves the cap off the toothpaste/her coat on the floor/the twist tie off the bread. The couple hasn’t touched in 60 days. Resentment grows.

Zuzu and Agnes met at a law school information night, and their relationship grew as they studied together for the bar. Where Agnes grew up in a wealthy white neighborhood, Zuzu grew up biracial in a rural area.

“Agnes was a go-getter,” Zuzu recalls of the social cache Agnes provided, “a firecracker. The subtext often seemed to be this: You, Zuzu, are none of these things, but you get to sleep with someone who is.”

Woven amidst flashbacks to her youth, Zuzu’s current life continues. Her father dies, and she and Agnes go east for the memorial service. Along the way, we meet Zuzu’s mother, her pregnant sister, and Noel Rafferty, who went to the same high school and college as Zuzu and who has been smitten with her since they were kids. Zuzu, for her part, is dismissive to Noel to the point of cruelty.

“We knew and understood each other well,” Zuzu thinks. “We were accustomed to dwelling in spaces where nobody thought to look for Black people.”

Toward the end of their sojourn east, Agnes and Zuzu visit Agnes’ ex, Heidi. The visit does not go well. Zuzu ends up being so strangely jealous of Heidi that she leaves in the middle of the night.

cover of The Other Wife is a blocky painting of two woman, a bottle of wine and a coupe wine glass
"The Other Wife" centers a biracial, bisexual late-30s protagonist and her struggle against the clichés in her married life. (Riverhead)

“Why hadn’t she just married Heidi?” Zuzu laments. At first, that seems to suggest jealousy, but perhaps it merely articulates what Zuzu has wanted all along — freedom from cliché and social stasis.

On the surface, the novel is cringey, in the way that perennial dissatisfaction amidst good fortune is cringey. And yet identity is so subtly mined by Thomas-Kennedy (who sometimes reviews books for the Minnesota Star Tribune) that what appears to be restlessness seems rather to be a wound that even Zuzu can’t articulate. As a portrait of a biracial, bisexual person’s discomfort in the space society allows them, the novel’s lasting effect is nuanced and thought-provoking.

Christine Brunkhorst is a Minneapolis writer and teacher.

The Other Wife

By: Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 290 pages.

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Christine Brunkhorst

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photo of author Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

Star Tribune reviewer Jackie Thomas-Kennedy explores an LGBTQ- and race-impacted take on marital ennui in her debut novel, "The Other Wife."