South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Woman sends spouses back to attic
Some say a good marriage is when you wake up and choose your spouse again, every day, a truism Londoner Lauren repeatedly puts to the test in Holly Gramazio’s rollicking “The Husbands.”
As the book opens, a tipsy Lauren is returning home from a bash when she encounters a strange man, claiming to be her husband, in her apartment. One problem? She’s not married. Hundreds more problems? Lauren quickly discovers that when her possible-husband goes up into the attic, a completely different husband comes down. Over the course of the book, set during one year, she repeatedly sends husbands into the attic in search of better models, cycling through up to a dozen a day.
It’s a screwball setup that Gramazio has tons of fun with. Does Lauren even want a husband? And, given the panoply of options, can she stand any candidate for more than a few days?
“The Husbands” plays like a wildly entertaining variation on “Groundhog Day,” in which Lauren keeps repeating the concept of marriage, learning about herself from each spouse. Gramazio, a game designer making her fiction debut, keeps the concept lively by inventing real-world solutions that make sense in Lauren’s magic-attic world.
Lauren may strike readers as too flip — one theme of “Husbands” is that she needs to figure out who she is — but Gramazio has invented a heroine who is great company and as quick with a quip as she is to send a husband with bad table manners packing.
One conclusion about a woman who rejects literally hundreds of spouses in her yearlong round of speed marrying is that she doesn’t want a husband. Gramazio allows for that possibility in “Husbands,” which she seems to have had a little trouble figuring out how to end. But, even if Lauren doesn’t have much luck with marriage, this book is a match made in heaven for readers in search of a zippy read. — Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune
In December 2023, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s homelessness assessment identified an estimated 653,100 individuals who, on a single night, were unhoused or were housed in shelters and the like. More than 186,000 of them were in families with children, while almost 35,000 experienced homelessness alone, without family, while still being kids themselves.
You may not be aware of these youths sleeping under bridges or in doorways, living in their cars or cheap hotels. In the mid-2000s, Florida resident Vicki Sokolik wasn’t aware of them, either. A “stay-at-home mom” raising two kids, Sokolik was affluent enough to donate scores of Thanksgiving meals and Christmas gifts but was motivated more by “trying to make (herself ) feel better.”
Her incentive changed after encountering “unaccompanied homeless youth,” defined as those younger than 25, not living with a parent or guardian, and lacking safe, stable housing.
In “If You See Them,” Sokolik writes how she went from “searching for meaning” to making a difference, founding a nonprofit that has helped hundreds of homeless youths by providing the resources, advocacy and care they need to learn to succeed independently.
Like Sokolik — who exhibits a boundless, indomitable determination — her book tries to do it all, acting as public-policy primer, introspective autobiography and nonprofit origin story, while introducing around 10 kids who benefited from “Starting Right, Now,” the organization she founded to help 15- to 19-year-olds in west central Florida.
I wish the book — while unquestionably wellintentioned, informative and laudable — had focused on just a couple of kids. After reading “If You See Them,” you only really know Sokolik.
We can’t all emulate Sokolik, but her example should motivate us not only to see these folks but to help them if we can. — Cory Oldweiler, Minneapolis Star Tribune