🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Divorce yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
You know those books where you spend the whole time feeling sick to your stomach? Yeah. That’s this one. The Divorce is Freida McFadden doing what she does best: unreliable narrators, characters that make you question everything, and a twist that completely recontextualizes the whole story. Except this time she doesn’t give you one unhinged character. She gives you three. And somehow all three of them manage to justify every terrible thing they do, at least in their own heads. By the end you’ll be sitting there going… wait. Wait. Who was the real villain this whole time?
I’ll tell you right now: I think it’s Jeremy. It was always Jeremy.
The Full Summary — Spoilers Included
The Divorce That Wasn’t Really About a Divorce
The book opens with Naomi coming home to find the garage won’t open and her key won’t fit the lock. Her husband Jeremy is home, which never happens, and he has a “surprise” for her — he’s renovating the entire house. He’s also changed all the locks, packed up her belongings, and arranged for her to stay at his parents’ old apartment immediately while he and their son Teddy come along tomorrow. Because obviously that’s what you do during a renovation.
I genuinely don’t know how she didn’t clock that something was wrong immediately, but okay. She goes. She picks Teddy up from school the following day, Jeremy never actually packs Teddy’s things, and when she gets to the apartment Jeremy shows up with an iPad instead of suitcases, tells Teddy to go watch “monkey videos” — a secret code between them meaning disappear into your room — and then admits the truth. There is no renovation. He wants a divorce. He has not been happy for a long time. And by the way, it’s his house, he bought it before they met, so she can just stay in the apartment as long as she needs it, while he keeps the family home.
What really gets me is that she just… accepts all of this. She agrees to let Teddy sleep at Jeremy’s house at night and only see him after school. She decides NOT to get a lawyer because Jeremy is such a good man and surely they can just talk this through. And less than 24 hours later she gets an email from his lawyer, who has clearly had this paperwork prepared for a while, and she still doesn’t fully wake up.
She figures it out when she drives to the house to “just talk” and finds Jeremy making out with a woman in the driveway. That woman is Veronica. Who then walks over and introduces herself to Naomi like they’ve been friends for years: “It was so good to finally meet you, Naomi.” Obviously this has been going on a long time. And here’s the thing — Naomi notices immediately that there’s nothing behind Veronica’s eyes. No love. She doesn’t actually love Jeremy. She wants something from him.
She’s not wrong about that. She’s just going to spend most of this book being wrong about nearly everything else.
The Battle Begins
Jeremy serves Naomi the divorce papers at a school meeting. Because of course he does, in front of everyone.
When Naomi finally decides she needs a lawyer, Jeremy has already pre-retained every halfway competent divorce attorney in the city. Stephanie, Carrie — all of them already on his payroll, so every avenue she tries is blocked before she even gets there. Stephanie at least feels bad enough about it to give Naomi the card for Ezra Fletcher, who she describes as kind of a jack-of-all-trades but really good. Naomi is skeptical. She has no other options, so she goes.
And this is where I started loving this book, because Ezra Fletcher is a gift. He’s not some slick hotshot attorney. He’s just a guy who works late and makes house calls to Naomi’s apartment because the part of town his office is in isn’t great after dark, and he treats her situation like it actually matters. He looks at the prenup Jeremy thinks is airtight and says yeah, no, this is a mess. And he shows up to mediation where Jeremy claims there is in fact money in the joint account — Ezra produces a bank statement from five days ago showing the joint account did not have money in it five days ago. Jeremy moved it out and then put it back, expecting them to just check the live balance. He didn’t count on Ezra being that prepared.
The custody fight is where Jeremy goes fully feral. He wants full custody of Teddy. He claims Naomi is always late, unstable, that she locks Teddy in his room for hours and leaves him to fend for himself, and that she’s been calling Veronica from a blocked number and threatening to kill her. None of this is documented. Veronica is the only witness to any of it. Jeremy’s lawyer was also apparently not made aware that Veronica has a heroin possession record, and when Ezra drops that at mediation they have to adjourn for the day.
Meanwhile, things have started happening at Naomi’s apartment. Door left ajar when she always locks it. Shower curtain drawn when she never draws it. Knife missing from the butcher block, later found in the sink. And then the elephant Veronica gave Teddy, found with a kitchen knife stabbed through it. And then Naomi realizes her brand-new 50-count Tylenol bottle only has three capsules left, and she thinks back to the kombucha she drank and got violently sick from, and the whole picture starts to form. She thinks Veronica has been breaking into her apartment and trying to hurt her.
A neighbor at Veronica’s old address confirms that she believes Veronica went after a previous employer, that Veronica arranged for his wife to “fall down the stairs” when things didn’t go the way she wanted. The neighbor also says Veronica absolutely despised children. Naomi tells Jeremy all of this. He already knew about the drug history. He does not care even a little bit.
The birthday party is where things go sideways in a way you can feel building but can’t stop. Jeremy tells Naomi to come at noon. She arrives at noon. He says he said one. (He didn’t. He never does.) He demands she leaves, then he’s calling the police. She refuses to leave, rips away from an officer’s grip, and gets arrested and booked. Jeremy files a temporary protection order. She cannot go near Jeremy or Teddy for at least a couple weeks. Ezra has to come spring her from jail.
Naomi Makes the Worst Decision of Her Life (And Then Several More)
Her mother’s advice, after hearing all of this, is to get rid of Veronica before Veronica gets rid of her. Which is unhinged advice and also, apparently, the only thing Naomi processes clearly.
She goes to pick up her car from Jeremy’s house and decides that maybe Veronica won’t know about the protection order, maybe Jeremy never mentioned it to her, so she’ll just knock on the door, claim Jeremy sent her to pick up Teddy, and see what happens. What happens is that at some point she picks up a rock and brings it down on Veronica’s skull when Veronica tries to call Jeremy. Teddy comes downstairs while Veronica is unconscious, Naomi gets him back to his room, tapes Veronica up, and drags her down to the cellar.
While she has Veronica’s phone, a text pops up: “I took the test and it’s positive.” Naomi assumes this means Veronica is pregnant.
Naomi texts as Veronica, suggesting to Jeremy that maybe they’ve been too hard on his ex-wife, maybe they should back off. Jeremy responds that he’s known Naomi for five years and she’s crazy, that last night Veronica herself was saying they weren’t being aggressive enough, and what is going on? So much for Veronica having all the power in this relationship.
The doorbell rings. It’s Ezra. He heard Veronica scream. Naomi pushes him down the stairs. He plays dead, then, when Naomi isn’t watching, he gets up, knocks her out, and frees Veronica. He tells her to go get Teddy. Teddy won’t open the door for anyone without the code word. Veronica doesn’t know it, but eventually Teddy is afraid enough that he opens it, she gets through to him, and they get out. The house is on fire — Naomi lit it before she went unconscious in the basement.
Veronica’s Story, and the Twist That Recontextualizes Everything
We get Veronica’s backstory, and this is where the whole book cracks open.
Six years ago, Veronica had a baby with her boyfriend Clay and named him Dominic. Clay promised to get clean and instead left the house to calm the baby down with a car ride, got high within hours, and Dominic vanished. When Veronica went to the police they didn’t take her seriously — no birth certificate registered, she didn’t look like she’d just given birth, one officer suggested she might have stolen the baby herself — and then Clay gets arrested for drug possession. Years later, a friend working at Town Hall records found something: a week after Dominic disappeared, a birth certificate had been filed for a Naomi Paxton, with a son named Theodore.
Teddy.
Veronica tracked Jeremy down because the name matched and she needed to know. She saw Teddy at the park and he is the spitting image of Clay. She started running into Jeremy “by accident,” learned that he never would have married Naomi if not for the pregnancy — they were already broken up when Naomi turned up pregnant — and that Jeremy had done a DNA test confirming Teddy was his. What Veronica figured out was that Naomi had run that test on Jeremy’s father, who has memory issues and would have been easy to swab. Confirming the Paxton family line, not Jeremy’s paternity directly.
By Teddy’s birthday party, Veronica had done her own DNA test on Teddy. He IS Dominic. He is her son. She plans to tell Jeremy but chickens out when he mentions the protection order and then leaves on a business trip, asking her to watch Teddy while he’s gone. She’s sitting with this information, alone, in Jeremy’s house with Teddy, right up until Naomi shows up at the door.
The Epilogue That Changes Absolutely Everything
Then we get Jeremy.
A couple of years ago a man approaches him, confirms his identity, and says he has something that belongs to him. His name is Clay. He thinks Jeremy has his son. Jeremy takes another DNA test and it comes back negative — Teddy is not Jeremy’s biological child. But Jeremy is the only father Teddy has ever known, and he is not about to let that change.
So he had Clay killed. Staged it as a heroin overdose.
The Tylenol in the kombucha? Jeremy. The knife through the elephant? Jeremy. All the gaslighting with wrong pickup times and false accusations? Jeremy. He had already planned to kill Naomi — first the Tylenol attempt through her kombucha, and when that didn’t work, his plan was an overdose on sleeping pills after the divorce was finalized. She was the only other person who knew Teddy wasn’t biologically his, so he thought. He had already decided she was a problem to be eliminated. Now I can’t help but wonder what happens when Veronica tells him Teddy is actually her son. Does he kill her too or do they live happily ever after?
Jeremy was the craziest one in this whole zoo. I lock that in completely.
Best Part of This Book
Cora and Ezra, without question. In a book full of characters who are either manipulating each other, defending people who don’t deserve it, or actively plotting murder — these two are just trying to help Naomi see what’s happening in front of her face. Cora keeps showing up and saying the things Naomi refuses to hear: Jeremy is gaslighting you, stop defending him, he made his choice, get everything in writing. And Ezra just quietly does his job and does it exceptionally well, making house calls because he doesn’t want her coming to a sketchy neighborhood after dark, telling her “I’m going to win this one for you.” He means it. Two people with actual good intentions in an entire book full of chaos, and they make the whole thing feel a lot less bleak than it has every right to be.
Worst Part of This Book
Naomi defending Jeremy for far, far too long. I understand it — she loved him, she thought he was a good man, she couldn’t reconcile the person she knew with what was being laid out in front of her. But there is a point where Cora has told her multiple times that he’s gaslighting her, Ezra has torn the prenup apart at mediation and caught Jeremy moving the joint account money, Veronica has basically told her she expects to be Teddy’s stepmother who spends more time with him than his own mother, and Naomi is still out here like “but he’s such a good husband.” Lady. He changed the locks on your house, pre-retained every lawyer in the city before he even told you he wanted a divorce, and is trying to buy you out of your son’s life for half a million dollars. That is not a good man. That has never been a good man. Cora said it. Ezra said it. The whole reading audience is saying it. We needed her to get there faster.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied, with one thing I wanted more of. The ending is genuinely wild — Ezra playing dead in the basement, the house on fire, and then Jeremy’s epilogue where he just calmly recounts everything he did and everything he was planning to do and we realize the full scope of it. Going back through the book knowing what he was actually doing the whole time, that’s the good stuff.
The one thing I wanted more of was the aftermath. Veronica was about to tell Jeremy that Teddy is Dominic. We don’t see that conversation. The book ends right at the edge of all of it and part of me wanted to sit in the fallout a little longer.
Steam Rating Breakdown
- Sex? No
- Open or closed door? N/A
- Descriptive? N/A
- How much? This is a thriller with zero romance — come for the chaos, not the steam
Would I Reread It?
No. Not because it wasn’t a good book — it absolutely was — but because this one gave me a genuine sick feeling in my stomach thinking about how Jeremy treated Naomi. How calculated all of it was. How long he had been planning it before she had any idea. How he set her up to look unstable while quietly arranging to have her killed. It’s the kind of story that sits with you after, and once was enough. I don’t need to feel that twice.
Who Is This For
If you love thrillers that keep pulling the rug out from under you, this is for you. If you’ve read Freida McFadden before and want to see her take on a multi-POV domestic thriller where literally no one is who they seem, grab this one. Just go in knowing that all three characters are going to frustrate you at some point — because they’re all making terrible decisions for what they each believe are completely logical reasons. And then Jeremy’s epilogue arrives and you realize the most terrifying person in the room was playing the role of wronged husband the whole time.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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🎧 | Genre: Thriller | Steam: 🔥 | Narrators: January LaVoy, Edoardo Ballerini & Marin Ireland
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