The Bookish Ashley

What is a happily ever after really worth?

Freida McFadden knows how to take a seemingly perfect life and turn it completely upside down.

The Divorce follows Naomi, whose picture-perfect marriage suddenly implodes when her husband kicks her out, brings in an army of expensive divorce lawyers, drains their accounts, and moves on with a much younger woman. Basically, her happily-ever-after goes from dream house to absolute nightmare overnight.

And Naomi? She doesn’t exactly handle it quietly.

What starts as curiosity about her husband’s new girlfriend quickly becomes something much darker. As Naomi begins digging into the lives around her, secrets start coming to the surface, and the line between revenge, survival, and obsession gets increasingly blurry.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this book was the messiness of the characters. Naomi isn’t your typical perfectly rational heroine, and honestly, that made her much more interesting. You’re constantly questioning her choices, her motives, and just how far she’s willing to go to get her old life back.

The story also does what McFadden does best: keeps you questioning what you think you know. There are plenty of twists, shifting perspectives, and moments where you think you have everything figured out—only to realize you probably don’t.

That said, this wasn’t a five-star read for me. Some of the characters’ decisions felt a little too convenient, and there were moments where the plot leaned heavily into thriller logic rather than realism. A few developments also felt predictable once the story started revealing its cards.

Still, I flew through it.

The Divorce is the kind of thriller that makes you say, “Okay, just one more chapter,” and then suddenly it’s midnight. It’s dramatic, dark, addictive, and just the right amount of unhinged.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 5

If you like domestic thrillers filled with marriage drama, revenge, secrets, unreliable characters, and twists that keep you guessing, The Divorce is an easy one to add to your list.

My verdict: Not perfect, but thoroughly entertaining and sometimes that’s exactly what I want from a thriller.