Review by Emily Webber
Susan Finch’s collection of loosely interconnected short stories, Dear Second Husband, is set entirely in Nashville. However, what stands out most are the characters—with relationships strained by grief, violence, dissatisfaction, and changing lives. Finch’s keen eye for everyday moments pulsing with emotional depth makes this collection deeply engaging. Whether a character faces a miscarriage, a family dynamic departs from expectations, or a marriage unfolds differently than imagined, the reader sees their relationships with each other shift, fracture, or strengthen.
The collection opens in full force with a woman trying to escape her violent ex-husband in “Dear Second Husband.” What sets this story apart are the sections in which Devin, following her therapist’s advice, writes notes to an imagined second husband. Through these short notes, the reader feels the full brunt of everything stolen from Devin, along with the anxiety and fear she’s been dealing with for years, now second nature to her. Finch places a haunting image towards the end of the story, in which a co-worker finds her body because a cluster of butterflies is drawn to her blood.
As he crossed onto the ridge, his heavy tread frightened a swarm of butterflies, a kaleidoscope he’d heard it called once, and he could see why now as the butterflies dispersed into the air around him, tumbling, flittering, and falling like blocks of light.
The image of these often-admired insects is first described as beautiful, but upon closer inspection, the presence of blood disrupts that perception. This mirrors the way Devin’s ex-husband was seen as charming and non-threatening by others, leading to a dismissal of the danger she faced until it was too late. The butterfly, often a symbol of rebirth and endurance, shows an intersection that many of these stories take. Sometimes endurance and the desire for renewal pay off, and sometimes they are not enough.
In two of the following stories, “Nothing Less Than 20,000 Watts” and “Promises, Promises,” the endurance shifts in favor of the characters. In the latter, a woman perseveres in developing a connection with the standoffish, sometimes hostile, teenage daughter of her new partner. In the former, a woman feels isolated in her own grief after a miscarriage. Until she hears her husband say something on his radio show that sparks a change, coupled with her husband’s resilience in finding a way back to her.
There are a few stories in the collection that feel less complete than the others, but they serve well as companions to the main stories, solidifying the relationships among the characters and showing them in a full group dynamic. But Finch plays out the connections well. In “Everybody Has a Flood Story,” a woman meets a married man in a bar, and then in “My Friends, My Sisters, My Doppelgängers,” the reader meets Lynn again in the aftermath of her relationship with Marshall as she wades through a different kind of grief. Jackie and Ethan from Nothing Less Than 20,000 Watts” reappear, and the reader can see a new strength in their relationship.
The last story turns to a mother and daughter, the mother whom the reader meets in an earlier story while she is pregnant. In “Our Bodies Know How to Hold On,” Felicia wants to tell her daughter “how to avoid the riptides ahead, the people who will suck you under, but the truth is, she can’t even fathom the danger ahead for her child.” And this is how it goes in the stories of Dear Second Husband: their worlds change in big and small ways, pushing them to change for better and worse.
Dear Second Husband by Susan Finch
Carnegie-Mellon University Press / February 2026
ISBN 9780887487279
Emily Webber is a reader of all the things hiding out in South Florida with her husband and son. A writer of criticism, fiction, and nonfiction, her work has appeared in the Ploughshares blog, America Magazine, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated.