When a bad-boy horse trainer settles down with a girl who loves a roller coaster ride, it’s no wonder that their daughter has trouble sleeping. Ten-year-old Mattie is the child raising her parents in Karen Shepard’s The Bad Boy’s Wife, a wonderfully perceptive treatment of a marriage based on passion—and not much else.

The novel begins with Mattie’s mother, Hannah, lurking in the shadows of her ex-husband’s new life. After a fifteen-year marriage, bad boy Cole has ditched Hannah, but for her, divorce is just a word. She spends much of her time in the stables within shouting distance of the house Cole shares with his new wife and baby. Hannah exists in a dream state of nostalgia and self-torture. She fantasizes about forgiving Cole “for Mattie’s sake,” and taking him back, “but only if he asks,” while she perversely admires and wishes she were her replacement, the new wife.

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—Ann Cummins