The Professor’s Wife is about enduring love and the darkness that lives in all of us when it is threatened by the unexpected twists and bends of life itself. A can’t-put-down book!… I read late into to the night because I just had to know what the ending was going to be.

Dr. Carl Bingham, a middle-aged professor of British literature was content living a life of relative solitude. That all changed when the seductive twenty-seven-year-old art student, Camilla Jones, walked into his office.

Camilla was mesmerized by his eloquent reading of poetry in class and attracted to him because of his age. She was determined to have him and even with Carl’s resistance, she won out.

Though their ages were decades apart, Carl regarded Camilla as wise beyond her years. The two married not long into their relationship and managed to fulfill each other’s needs for twenty years, or it seemed.

The Professor’s Wife takes us back and forth from when they met to the present. Initially we know that he is quite old, and she is suffering from physical pain and painkillers. However, we figure out that there is so much more to their lives. As the problems surface, we know the story will become quite disturbing as we wait for the other shoe to drop. It finally does, but not in the way I expected.

This novella takes us to dark places but deals with very real issues. From mental illness and lifelong emotional pain that we could discuss for days, author Marina DelVecchio expresses their story with descriptive and gorgeous prose, carefully weaving in the intense romance and sex between life’s bleak reality. At only 113 pages, she fully develops her characters, and we finally understand the couple and what brought them to where they are at this point.

For those who are not afraid to delve into the eeriness of real life and explore the human condition, The Professor’s Wife is for you.

This book is a love story. No it is a mystery story. No I mean it is a horror story. Well whatever it is, it is really good and will keep you guessing up to the last minute. The main plot line is about a middle age college professor who is seduced by a 27 year old student. They fall in love and marry (against the advice of her best friend) and the rest of the story goes on from there. I definitely recommend this book.

Well the book was good once I got into it but the shift between past and present was a bit tricky at times.

This novel is an uneasy, unsavory blend of erotica, romance, and Gothic elements, and it is ultimately too formulaic in execution. While the author is careful to craft a solipsistic dyad of growing madness and mutual obsession, the result goes beyond what is palatable. Restraint would have helped this novel, particularly in reducing the repetition of the couple’s lovemaking. Less is more, and by trimming some of the erotic content, would have strengthened the narrative instead of stretching credulity.
Finally, the characters are remote and unlikeable, despite the exhaustive examination of their thoughts and emotions. The professor and the professor’s wife are both deeply damaged individuals, and the explanation for their suffering comes too late to explain the self-destructive quality of their relationship. As the titular character, the wife should be better understood as being willingly confined by her role in that codependent marriage. The author is quite adept at creating atmosphere, but unfortunately it is not a place one wants to linger.

I had high hopes for this one and it definitely sounded like the type of book that I love to read and am drawn to, however this just didn't hold my attention and I wanted more from this story and its characters. Unfortunately a DNF for me. Thanks to NetGalley and publishers for this ARC.

A darker side to relationships, and connections. The story and setting intrigued me and sustained me as I read. Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

Thank you for allowing me a preview. I just couldn't connect with this story and did not finish. I stopped and restarted a couple of times to give it a fair chance but just wasn't my cup of tea. Best wishes to you all and thank you again for allowing me the preview.

The professors wife by Marina Delvecchio.
Carl Bingham is a lonely British Literature Professor who has sworn off love and sex since an affair with a student at Skidmore College almost lost him his tenure and reputation. Camilla is a young artist who sits in his classroom, mesmerized by his voice and appearance. Despite their age difference, they fall in love, marry, and feed each other’s physical and emotional needs. But when secrets and betrayals begin to threaten the bond they have forged and have found nowhere else, how far will each go to keep the other from disappearing? The Professor’s Wife is about enduring love and the darkness that lives in all of us when it is threatened by the unexpected twists and bends of life itself.
A good read with good characters I liked the cover 4*.

This book was supposed to be a psychological thriller and I was looking forward to that. But it failed to deliver. And it was hard to finish. I voluntarily read this book via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion,

The Professor’s wife is listed as a thriller/mystery, I felt that the more I read the more it jumped out as a romance novel. I struggled to connect with the main characters Carl and Camilla throughout their dark love story. The chapters skip between present day and the past, this was very perplexing, there is no date at the beginning of the chapter therefore taking a while to figure out what was happening. The ending was unexpected but cannot account for the struggle that it was to finish. The Professor’s wife does highlight and bring your attention to how fragile mental health can be, and that life events can often have an ongoing effect on you no matter how hard you try to push past it. Therefore I give The Professor’s wife 2 stars out of 5.

I would like to thank NetGallery for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I did not like the title of this novel, but I started reading it anyway and about 60% in I decided I should have gone with my first instinct. The problem with the title is that it presents the main female character as an appendage or an extension of some guy - subjugated to him, not having an existence of her own. It's a poor choice to depict a character like that particularly when far too many women are so readily marginalized in society anyway.

The idea behind the story is one that I liked, which is why I read this, despite my misgivings over the title. I know that some people, particularly younger readers, are turned-off or even disgusted by May-December relationships, but I am not. I don't even like the term May-December which, if we assign about eight years per month, means the one participant is 40 and the other is in their nineties. A better depiction in this case would be a March-July relationship which sounds much sweeter to me!

All kidding aside, it's none of our damned business when two (or more!) consenting adults choose to be together. It's their choice, not ours; not society's; not the law's; not religion's. In this case, college student Camilla, falls for professor Carl. Her purported BFF (more on that anon) Chelsea, has dire misgivings, but the author offers us no valid reason for her revulsion. Regardless, Carl and Camilla start dating, marry quite soon and seem to be in an idyllic relationship. Camilla quits the professor's classes so the author at least avoids any impropriety in terms of authority figure versus supplicant here. Far too many so-called romance novels are oblivious of power imbalances in relationships.

For me the problem with this one though, is the same problem in very nearly all modern romance novels, which is that it's predicated entirely on sex. There is no meeting of minds. It's not about romance. It's not about any of the big C's: chemistry, commonalities, companionship, or compatibility. No, I'm not talking about carat, clarity, color, or cut! Here, it's all about the sex, and repeated descriptions of that act do not make it more exciting; they make it boring, which destroys the novel because it was only about sex.

Consequently, at that point, I could no longer take this story seriously, and writing sleight of hand couldn't disguise exactly where this story was going. At least, without having read the ending, it seemed to me like it had an awful lot in common with a certain 1959 novel by Robert Bloch

Talking of dates, there was an issue for me regarding exactly when this novel was set. It felt like it was contemporary, but no one seemed to have a cell-phone and Camilla and her BFF never texted each other or emailed - they wrote "letters" to each other, so maybe it was historical, but if so, I was lost because I had no good idea when it took place which further added to the 'fake' aura it projected to me. Maybe somewhere in the text it reveals when it's set, but if so, I missed it.

As so often happens with stories like this one, I found myself much more interested in the main character's friend than I was in plain vanilla Camilla. Chelsea plays a very minor role which seems odd given all the telling we get at the start of the novel as to how close they are and how much they love each other as friends. But that's telling; when it comes to showing, we get very little. It occurs to me that a story about Chelsea had the potential to be much more interesting, and rather less predictable than this one was.

The big betrayal of their BFF myth came when Chelsea revealed to Camilla that she had been accepted into a prestigious art program, and when Camilla asked when she was leaving, she was told it would be the very next day. Seriously? How close could they be if Chelsea has applied to this program, been accepted, and made plans to move her life away from Camilla, and she gives her supposed BFF only 24 hours notice of the entire thing? That, to me, gave the lie to their supposed closeness. The whole story felt exposed for the fakery that it was at that point; it all seemed so shallow.

We're told that Camilla is a young artist, for example but we're never shown that. Oh yeah, we get a mention of her painting and it plays a role in revealing her sickness later in the story, but I never got the feeling that she was an artist at all. Like I said, it was all about sex. She never was an artist, not even in bed! She never talked about art; she never went to any exhibitions or galleries, and we're never shown her actually doing any painting. Again, it felt fake.

The same applied to the professor who was weirdly described as a professor of British literature (not English, British!) As with Camilla, we're never shown any of this side of him. All we get is telling that he arrives home with a bunch of papers to grade. It felt superficial - like frosting on a badly-baked cake. This is why it was amusing (to my warped mind!) to find some technical writing issues. They seemed to fit right in with this threadbare world-building.

At one point I read, "The only light that broke through the dark blanket covering the small kitchen came from the streetlight peeking through the small window above the sink and the dusted chandelier that hung low above the table they had gathered, about to eat." Not only is that a horribly run-on sentence, but it makes little sense. I assume the blanket didn't literally cover the kitchen, but covered the entrance to the kitchen, or maybe a window in the kitchen? Who knows? Even so, why? Why was there a blanket covering anything?

This was just dropped in there without any prior or following reference, and it made no sense. I honestly have no good idea about what author was trying to say there. On top of this - literally - was "...the dusted chandelier..."? Did this mean it had just been dusted or did the author mean it was dusty? And who has a chandelier above the kitchen table?! And "the table they had gathered" Did she mean 'around which they had gathered'? Or should that comma before 'about' have been after it? That sentence was a godawful mess.

Later I read, "...lift her t-shirt, and follow the trail down to her cervical bone. He slipped his fingers inside her panties...." The cervical bone is the first one in your neck right below your skull. The one I think the author means here is the pubic bone, which lies right underneath the mons pubis. Just a wild guess!

At another point I read, "Carl is a tab bit of a weirdo" That would be ‘tad’ not ‘tab’ and since 'tad' already means a very small amount, the ‘bit’ isn’t necessary, although given the lax way people speak this is fine to use in a character’s speech. There were probably other such issues that I missed since I was reading for entertainment and not editing this; fortunately, the novel wasn't replete with them so this wasn't a huge problem. A little judicious editing is definitely called for though.

The real problem though, was with the story-telling here. To me, the story seemed more like a series of disconnected vignettes than a coherent whole, and having timeline jump around only served to confuse things more. Like I said, I DNF'd this when it became too bad for me to continue. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I knew exactly where it was going and it wasn't anywhere engaging to me. I lost interest in it and skimmed for a little while longer, but around 60% I decided I had given this enough chances to appeal to me and it failed. I can't therefore commend it was a worthy read.

A short, quick read, and I was glad. It was listed as mystery/thriller, so I felt short-changed. Not a whole lot to recommend.