As soon as I read the synopsis for Holly Gramazio’s “The Husbands,” I knew I had to read it. A single woman who finds an attic in her flat that spits out husbands sounded fun and right up my alley! I love romcoms with a touch of magical realism, and the synopsis sounded like it would deliver. While I enjoyed the book initially, it soon grew repetitive, and the ending (in my opinion) was very lackluster, leaving me wondering what the point of it all was.

At the top of the book, we meet the protagonist, Lauren, who is slightly inebriated and stumbling home to her London flat after a bachelorette party. Lauren was single when she left for the party, but when she arrives home afterward, she discovers a man at her door claiming to be her husband. The catch? She has no memory of ever meeting or marrying him. She knows she drank a lot, but she knows she didn’t drink THAT much. When the husband goes into the attic again, and a different man comes down the ladder, Lauren knows something is up, so she sends him back to the attic to grab something, and sure enough, a different man descends. Lauren feels as though this may be the answer to her problems. Since breaking up with her ex, Amos, Lauren has been single while the rest of her friends are happily married or engaged. Lauren now has the opportunity to skip right past the awkward phase of dating and the bother of planning a wedding. She can cycle through a string of husbands until she finds the right one. Easy peasy – or is it?

With each husband, Lauren’s life also changes ever so slightly. Sometimes, she’s rich, and other times, relatively poor. At one point, she and her husband are swingers and swap partners with her good friends who live downstairs, and other times, they’re drug addicts. Some guys are pretty great but mildly annoy Lauren, so she sends them back in hopes of a better man being just up the stairs, but as Lauren cycled through men like some people change underwear, I began to wonder when it would end. She seemed to be looking for not only the perfect man but also the perfect life, perfect job, etc., and everyone knows that it’s impossible to have it all – I just wished she had realized that.

The concept of an attic that generates endless husbands serves as a clever metaphor for the endless possibilities and choices we face in life – especially in today’s dating scene. We live in a transactional society, and just as we can pick up our phone and order groceries, food, or a phone charger and have it delivered in less than an hour, so too can we pick up a phone and go on an app and find a date or a quick hookup. We’ve grown so accustomed to having everything we could ever want at our fingertips, we seem to have lost patience with waiting for things to develop naturally. Some things – like love and, to an extent, attraction – take time, but with an endless string of possibilities in our hands, many people seem never to be satisfied – continually swiping right (or left), hoping to find perfection.

Through Lauren’s eyes, we are prompted to question the nature of modern relationships and how some people so quickly tear through partners looking for perfection when, in reality, they could likely benefit from taking a step back and looking inward. Maybe you’re not finding the “perfect” partner because you are also not perfect. I feel like that is what Gramazio was trying to tell us, but it didn’t quite land, mostly because I felt as though Lauren never woke up to that fact. I saw very little growth in her character, which is one of my biggest complaints about the book. Rather than grow and change, Lauren seemed to assume everything and everyone else was the problem, and in the end, she just gave up.

Another thing that bothered me was that we never learned why the attic started doing what it did or how it all worked. With the introduction of a “husband” who was also experiencing something similar (he could move through partners by climbing into a box), I hoped maybe we would get some answers, but sadly, that never happened. While I’m generally okay with not having all of the answers and leaving some things open to interpretation, I was left frustrated that there was no real character growth and no answers to why this happened in the first place.

In the end, I enjoyed the concept of this one. I felt the writing was strong, and I enjoyed the humor, but I didn’t understand what the point of it all was. Lauren’s character showed little to no growth, and we never learned why the attic suddenly started spitting out husbands. I got the message; I just wished it had been delivered in a way that was more impactful.