I’ve been suffering through a little bit of a book drought lately— of the seven books I’ve read in March, I’ve only ranked two of them above three stars, and if you’ve paid any attention to my Goodreads or Storygraph accounts (Follow me! I want friends!) you know that I tend to rate generously, as I don’t often buy books I don’t expect to like.
My wife was a little startled to see that I’d picked up Trad Wife, though, which probably doesn’t look like something I’d usually read, especially if you don’t happen to notice that clawed hand on the cover. I own this because of my Aardvark book box subscription; it’s pretty easy to get me to take a risk on a hardcover if it’s only $10, and the club in general has had a pretty good record for horror novels for me.
Because, yeah, this is a horror novel. It’s Rosemary’s Baby crossed with Nightbitch for the TikTok/Instagram generation, which was not a thing I ever expected to type. Main character Camille Deming is an aspiring Instagram influencer and “trad wife” person, meaning she stays at home and cooks and cleans and constantly posts pictures and videos of her perfect house and her perfect lifestyle. The problem is that she doesn’t have a baby, and she feels like her social media is never really going to take off (I feel you, sister) unless she manages to get herself knocked up. The problem is it keeps not happening, and her husband seems to be losing interest in her.
So obviously she’s gonna fuck the first demon who invades her dreams to promise her a child. I mean, really, who wouldn’t? And if the baby doesn’t turn out … quite like she expected, well. Do it for the ‘gram. Or something. I feel like young people at least used to say that.
I actually posted a review of this to GR/SG, and it read, in full, “Absolutely deranged. I loved it.”
A few hours later, this is probably going to be one of those books that declines a bit in my esteem with the passage of time, but its strength is that it’s a fast, propulsive read (only 300 pages) that you will probably finish far too quickly to think about it too much. Once you sit down and think about it— and, to be clear, this is something that I don’t recommend— it’s gonna develop a couple of holes here and there, and a couple of things about the setting are going to feel like they were contrived specifically so that the plot would work. Camille and her husband have just moved to a new home in a new town, for example, away from family and friends. Camille has no one other than her husband and an infuriatingly persistent and nosy neighbor who she’d rather do without, and she kind of has to be isolated for the plot to work— if she even had one good girlfriend the book would not have been able to unfold the way it did.
The book doesn’t actually really address her lack of friends; I assume it’s because she’s decided to dedicate herself solely to her husband; you’re gonna have to roll with it if you want to have a good time. Similarly, if her husband was even vaguely interested in being a good husband or a good father— either! it doesn’t have to be both!— a whole lot would have gone very differently. You will be annoyed by things like this if things like this generally annoy you. Do you want to like your main characters? You may not like Camille very much. I’m not certain you’re supposed to; I’m not sure the author likes her very much. But Trad Wife succeeds at being a creepy page-turner for the few hours you’ll spend with it, and sometimes that’s enough. I needed something I could dive into and enjoy, and it filled that role nicely.
