My Father's Wives: A Novel

Written by Mike Greenberg

Narrated by Andy Paris

The co-host of ESPN’s Mike and Mike follows up his New York Times bestseller All You Could Ask For with this poignant story of one man’s search to understand himself, his marriage, and his father.

Jonathan Sweetwater has been blessed with money, a fulfilling career, great kids and Claire, his smart, gorgeous, sophisticated wife. But there is one thing Jonathan never had: a relationship with his father.

Percival Sweetwater III has been absent from his son’s life since Jonathan was nine years old. A five-term U.S. senator, now dead, Percy was beloved by presidents, his constituents, and women alike, especially the five women who married him after Jonathan’s mother.

Jonathan hasn’t thought about Percy or the hole he left in his life for years. Dedicated to Claire and his family, he’s nothing like his serial monogamist father. But then Jonathan discovers evidence that everything in his marriage may not be as perfect as he thought. Hurt and uncertain what to do, he knows that the only way to move forward is to go back.

On this quest for understanding—about himself, about manhood, about marriage—Jonathan decides to track down his father’s five ex-wives. His journey will take him from cosmopolitan cities to the mile-high mountains to a tropical island—and ultimately back to confront the one thing Jonathan has that his father never did: home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780062371560

Mike Greenberg

Mike Greenberg is the cohost of ESPN's Mike and Mike, the highest-rated sports talk program in the United States, and the author of the New York Times bestselling books All You Could Ask For, Why My Wife Thinks I'm an Idiot, and Mike and Mike's Rules for Sports and Life. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a native of New York City. He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Reviews for My Father's Wives

[heidijones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Seymour Simon, once again, does not disappoint! His photography is captivating! The text is fascinating and full of facts that children will marvel over. Children are so naturally curious about science, and lightning is not something that they get to see often where we live. Thunder and lightning are so mysterious to young learners. Simon gives us a closer look and explains the concept perfectly.

[akonow_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simon Seymour is a fabulous non-fiction science writer. His book, “Lightning,” is an overall wealth of information. He shares what the Greeks and Indians thought of lightning. He shares interesting facts and details about lightning, like how the path of a lightning bolt is roughly 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This is five times hotter than the surface of the sun! Florida is the lightning capital of the United States. And Tucson’s high clouds make the city the most dramatic place in North America to watch lightning. Simon includes in his book three types of lightning; intracloud, cloud, and intercloud. He also mentions six different types of lightning, and three new types that scientists are still collecting data on. He also provides real photographs of lightning throughout the book, which allows a reader to see the beauty of lightning. I highly recommend this book as an awesome lightning resource.

[sharese_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Summary: Lightning is a part of the Smithsonian Institute's book series by Seymour Simon. The incredible information and stunning pictures make these books one that everyone will want to have around small children. Filled with facts about lightning and weather patterns, kids will have some questions answered but will find themselves wanting to learn more. The pictures on every page are brightly colored and beautiful to see. Review:This is yet again another wonderful book in this series. Amazing pictures and facts (I didn't know lighning has been dectected on Jupiter and Venus!) that will keep a young reader coming back for more. I think this book is especially important to read to young children who may be frightened of the loud thunder and scary visuals of light. A wonderful book and series.

[mhanover10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jonathan Sweetwater has it all. A wife he loves, two beautiful children and an amazing job that gives him privileges like playing basketball with Michael Jordan. What he didn't have was his father Senator Percy Sweetwater in his life since his 9th birthday. Jonathan comes home early and thinks he sees his wife having an affair in their spare bedroom. This sets into motion Jonathan wanting to know more about his dead father so he sets out to meet all of Percy's wives and learn more about him. What he doesn't expect to find along the way is himself. This book is beautifully written. It covers around a week or 2 of Jonathan's life. I found it very fascinating and pulled into Jonathan's life. Well worth the read.

I won this book on Goodreads.

[booklovers2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To be honest, not sure I would have picked this off the shelf if not for my local bookstore having this as the Lunch Book Pick for this month. Although, I do find the title of this book a winner introduction! You will really like Jonathan Sweetwater, he's a good son, a wonderful father and a faithful loving husband. He wakes up on Monday to a perfect life - by the end of the day - he's not so sure. - There are also quite a few quotes in this book that are worth repeating!! Give this one a try! The back of the book offers an excerpt to his other book --- "All you could ask for" .... I have to admit... I am hooked and I definitely have to get that book too!

[bookdivasreads · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jonathan Sweetwater seems to have it all: a great job, a perfect family, and a wonderful marriage. His childhood wasn't perfect as he hadn't seen his father since his ninth birthday. His mother was wonderful and supportive and his father, although a powerful political figure, had been married six times. After coming home early one day and witnessing an event that has the ability to tear apart his "perfect" life, Jonathan goes on a quest to find out more about his father.Imagine arriving home early from work and seeing someone that looks like your wife and another man getting dressed after a tryst in your guest room. Do you confront your wife and ask what is going on or do you ignore it? This is exactly the situation Jonathan finds himself in when he arrives from work early one day before going out-of-town on business. Most people would either ask what is going on, hire a detective to find out what's going on or jump to conclusions and end the relationship damn the circumstances. Jonathan does hire a detective to find out what's going on, but he also decides that now is the perfect time to learn more about his deceased father, the great senator, Percival Sweetwater III.Mixed in with business trips over the course of a two-week period, Jonathan meets with his mother and his father's other wives. Ostensibly these trips are to find out more about his father, but the more Jonathan learns about his father the more we realize he is trying to find out if he is anything like his father and striving for something that cannot be obtained, perfection.Although I enjoyed reading My Father's Wives and found it to be a rather fast-paced read, I did find it be somewhat predictable (no I won't give you the exact details but there is quite a bit of foreshadowing in Jonathan's interactions with one other character). Jonathan's quest for more information may be a bit more literal than most, but it is interesting to read about his struggle to learn more about his father and in turn about himself. I found most of the characters to be completely realistic and reasonably well developed. I wish the author had placed a bit more attention on Jonathan's wife Claire and who she was as a wife and mother (we learn quite a bit about Claire before their marriage but not enough about who she is now), but this deficiency doesn't detract from the overall story. There aren't any bad guys in this story, just humans showing varying degrees of human weaknesses. If you're interested in reading about a modern quest for truth, then you'll definitely want to read My Father's Wives.

[nbmars · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book begins when the main protagonist, Jonathan Sweetwater, comes home from work early one day only to find his wife of twelve years apparently having an affair with someone in the guest bedroom. In shock, he leaves the house and sets off on a business trip, trying to figure out what to do.For some reason never adequately explained, he decides he will find the answer by meeting with all the wives (a total of six including his mother) of his late father, who left Jonathan’s mother the night of Jonathan’s ninth birthday. Jonathan takes off, ostensibly on business trips, to meet up with these women and ask them about his dad.At the end of his quest, he makes a decision about his marriage that has more to do with what he figured out about the affair rather than anything to do with his father.Evaluation: The author has skill in writing prose, but perhaps not so much in plot construction. I didn’t see how the various subplots had anything to do with the main story arc. At one point, Jonathan says to one of the wives: “I feel like there was some answer I’ve been waiting … for, but when I finally tried to find it I realized I didn’t even know what the question was.” Substitute the word “plot” in the place of the words “question” and “answer” and that is a perfect summary of my reaction to the book. But it could well be that other readers will make more sense of it than I.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When you see things on the news about people who are on their umpty-umpth marriage, you wonder a little bit about them, don't you? What drives them to continue to marry person after person when their previous marriages have ended unhappily? What do they expect to find in their latest marriage that they haven't found yet? And when there is a child or children involved, how does this serial monogamy affect them? In Mike Greenberg's newest novel, main character Jonathan Sweetwater's father was a person like this, marrying six wives in total, and being too busy in those relationships to be in his son's life. It is the quest to learn who his father is, coupled with a staggering blow to his idea of what his own marriage is that drives the novel onwards. Jonathan is a high powered banker type who lives quite well. He has the perfect wife, the perfect children, and the perfect life. He is not only successful in what he does, being a favorite of the boss, but he comes from money and is the only child of the famous, liberal, late Senator Percival Sweetwater III. But being the Senator's child has left emotional scars and a strong desire to be a better father and husband than his own father was. Percy, you see, walked out of his son's life on his ninth birthday, when he left Jonathan's mother, wife number one, for wife number two in the eventual line of six. Mostly Jonathan doesn't pay any attention to this sad past but when he comes home from work early one day and catches a glimpse of a naked man in his guest room with a woman who can only be his wife, thinking that his life is shattered, rather than confront his wife, he is suddenly obsessed with tracking down his father's former wives and trying to learn from them who Percival Sweetwater III really was behind the legend and how that has formed Jonathan's own character. The connection between his wife's infidelity and his father's lifelong search for the perfect woman is tough to make. In all of his searching for explanations about his father, Jonathan doesn't really seem to find any answers and he waffles between worries he's too like his father or not at all like his father. His encounters with Percy's ex-wives all seem to follow a similar pattern and do little to shed light on the real man. Interestingly, none of the ex-wives seem particularly surprised by Jonathan's appearance in their lives despite his never being a presence while they were married to his father nor do they have much personal or revealing to say. They certainly can't speak to how Percy's behaviour might have formed Jonathan's character or why that would lead to his wife having an affair. At the end of his quest, he thinks he can explain why his father married each of the women but that still doesn't really connect to his own marriage and relationship. In between searching out Percy's ex-wives, Jonathan occasionally returns home and agonizes over his own marriage and the mystery of how he could have seen what he saw. The mystery of this is actually not a mystery at all to the reader, who has easily sussed out the ending long before Jonathan has a clue. As a result, the novel's outcome is completely predictable. The secondary characters, especially his wife and kids, are one dimensional. His billionaire, hard-partying, basketball playing boss is more well-rounded than they are. And his father's wives are not terribly well distinguished from each other. So when he draws conclusions about why his father married each of them, we just have to take his word for it that this one worshipped him but wasn't bright enough and that one was too intelligent and not worshipful enough, etc. because his brief interactions with the women don't show that to the reader. The concept, what we each look for in marriage, what perfect really means, and whether or not it is even possible, is interesting but I'm not sure it quite got there in the end.

[melinda_hence · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The novel has an interesting theme of chasing perfection.I exhausted all effort in understanding Greenberg’s estranged relationship with his father while simultaneously trying to figure out his wife’s alleged infidelity, I felt it failed to entwine the indiscretion scenario, it just didn’t work for me even after the narrative ended. I tried to view the link through male eyes, yet there is a strong unmistakeable disjointed feeling. After all is said and done the reader will be scratching their head attempting to figure it all out. The premise is interesting but the route a clear miss for this reader.Jonathan is a likable character, he didn’t wow me in any way. His outrageous lifestyle, his shocking discovery evoked zero emotion. His lack of confrontation is a copout, and it’s no surprise this privileged man living the so called ‘perfect life’ is ill equipped to handle any trial life delivers. If what he witnessed was the worst this man has experienced in his life, I pity him when life really delivers a haymaker. His affluence was a turn off, after the discovery you realize this man hasn’t experienced harshness in any form. Clearly his perfect world is in shambles thus leading with his admitted obsession of perfection and his discovery of what perfect really encompasses.Greenberg possesses competent writing, my issue was with Jonathan and his uber lush life and the way he handled his wife’s possible gaffe. The wife’s mystery wasn’t, the father was introduced but vaguely, a little more development would have possibly helped. A beach read of the wealthy and their frivolous issues they lack emotional capacity to handle, too manufactured for my taste.