“Life is long. And it’s getting longer for most of us. Most people in this country will have three or four marriages in their lifetime. Each one will challenge them and suit them in a different way. The lucky few, the ones who are willing to work at it, will have a handful of very different marriages, all with the same person.”

“…it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children’s needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn’t get. It’s very hard.”

“I’m too busy being the bad guy.” It was one of those things that get said in a marriage, something that starts out as a genuine compliment but turns into a criticism without either party noticing or caring all that much.” 

A hilarious and emotionally charged novel about a couple who embark on an open marriage-what could possibly go wrong?

Lucy and Owen, ambitious, thoroughly-therapized New Yorkers, have taken the plunge, trading in their crazy life in a cramped apartment for Beekman, a bucolic Hudson Valley exurb. They’ve got a two hundred year-old house, an autistic son obsessed with the Titanic, and 17 chickens, at last count. It’s the kind of paradise where stay-at-home moms team up to cook the school’s “hot lunch,” dads grill grass-fed burgers, and, as Lucy observes, “chopping kale has become a certain kind of American housewife’s version of chopping wood.”

When friends at a wine-soaked dinner party reveal they’ve made their marriage open, sensible Lucy balks. There’s a part of her, though – the part that worries she’s become too comfortable being invisible-that’s intrigued. Why not try a short marital experiment? Six months, clear ground rules, zero questions asked. When an affair with a man in the city begins to seem more enticing than the happily-ever-after she’s known for the past nine years, Lucy must decide what truly makes her happy – “real life,” or the “experiment?”

The Arrangement is a great look at love, marriage, and just life. It is a book I’ve been wanting to read for sometime. I’m not sure I could tell you what exactly I expected from this book, but I can tell you it proved to be even more than I thought. I expected drama, some humor and who knows what else…I got all that and more. This book will make you look at things differently and see your relationship for more than you imagined. Sarah Dunn shows us sides of many relationships some like we’ve all had, some we haven’t and some we pray we never do. Some that start great to go very wrong, some that start simple and get deep. You see something strong just fade and if you are very lucky you might get one that somehow survives everything you throw at it. 

I could go on about this book for sometime but even tho is was fun, funny, and had its share of drama (like I expected) this book took things so much deeper than I had ever thought. It was a great and well written story that I highly recommend to anyone!  It is 5 stars for me.

To purchase the arrangement Click HERE

Sarah Dunn has written for sitcoms from ‘Murphy Brown’ to ‘Spin City’ to ‘Bunheads’. In the early 00’s she left LA for New York to write her first novel, ‘The Big Love’, which has been translated into 23 languages. Today she’s the creator of ABC’s comedy hit ‘American Housewife’, and awaiting the publication of her third book, ‘The Arrangement’.