The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
Rating: 1.5/5 stars 🙁
Blurb
Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.
What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion?
The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky friend with whom to laugh about facile men, and an affectionate husband who loves her above all else. The only thing missing from this portrait is a baby. But motherhood is a serious undertaking, especially for the wife who has valued her selfhood above all else.
On a seemingly normal day, the best friend comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made that threaten to throw everything off balance, the wife’s two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions. Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts—the wife, the husband, the best friend—the day quickly unfolds to show how the trio’s dented visions of each other finally unravel, throwing everyone’s integrity into question – and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over pivotal years, into utter chaos.
At once subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive, The Three of Us explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal, ultimately asking: who are we if not for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the people we’re meant to love?
My review on The Three of Us
Rating: 1.5/5 stars
This book is a story of a woman, her husband, and her best friend. At first, I thought it was a lazy attempt at an enemy to lovers trope, until I continued to read.
It starts with the woman’s point of view. She knows and acknowledges the fact that her best friend, Temi, and her husband hated each other. The woman is unnamed, so we’ll call her Woman.
Woman and Temi became best friends at a young age, so it’s understandable that they had made plans together. One of those plans included not getting married nor having children. However, Woman eventually gets married, and Temi hates her husband with passion.
My major problem with Woman is why she put up with it and let it go on for so long. Her reason being that she didn’t want to pick sides wasn’t enough for me. Temi was not only infiltrating her space, but her husband’s too. She had zero respect for boundaries, and they needed their space as a couple. To me, Woman seemed like a people-pleasing person who just wanted be seen playing the role of a good wife. I also don’t think she loved her husband at all, considering she was always putting up an act, and she never even made an attempt to put a stop to the problem. She believed all she had to do was play the good wife.
To an extent, I actually understood the husband’s reasons for hating Temi. But, I think he was also being so extra with it. He let his hate for Temi drive him and his marriage way too much. Renovating your house because someone told you she had sex in it? That’s being extra if you ask me.
From Temi’s point of view, all I could see was an obsessive and manipulative lonely person with lack of understanding for boundaries, and a terrible case of savior complex. She was stuck in the past and that led to her wanting to “save” her best friend.
Overall, I did not enjoy this book for any reason. It was just the same story and events being told from different points of view, with very annoying characters. The book just ends like a mic drop; sudden and with no closure.
If you’d like to read chaos, it might be for you, but I know it wasn’t for me.