Hausfrau: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015: You are quickly reminded while reading Hausfrau that Essbaum is first a poet. Her descriptions from Anna's mundane trips through the market to her extracurricular erotic trysts are laced with poetic precision. Anna, an American, has found herself living in her Swiss husband's world of suburban Zurich. We travel with her as she fumbles to live up to all it means to be a good wife, mother, and daughter-in-law while she searches to understand something more and, maybe, somehow, to disrupt the everyday monotony. Flashbacks to the memories Anna allows us, along with poignant glimpses into her regular counseling sessions, are the only clues we are given to try to piece together what is truly going on inside Anna's mind. Where Hausfrau really catches you off guard is in the complete journey you find yourself haven taken at the end. I quickly found myself captivated and unable to step away from Anna s every day and as I read the last sentence of the book I was haunted. My thoughts travelled back through the story - the realizations settled in an amazement to all that had happened and hadn't. Essbaum, in her crafting of Hausfrau, executes a story that's telling is just as artful as the story told a quiet disruption that I still find myself thinking about weeks after reading. Penny Mann