![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Natalie is a wildly successful trad wife influencer. She and her husband Caleb have a farm and six adorable children, and Natalie has parlayed carefully edited clips of her perfect life into a lucrative career. (She leaves out the two nannies, 30 farm hands, and the fact that Sassafras the cow is actually four sequential cows, replaced every time one dies, like goldfish.)
Then Natalie suffers a mysterious fall from grace. And then she finds herself in what appears to be an alternate version of her own life in the 1800s, with a husband very similar but not quite identical to her original husband, and children who claim to be her own. Has she time traveled? Is she delusional? Has she gotten kidnapped into a non-consensual reality show?
This is an extremely interesting novel that makes a good companion to Saratoga Schrader's Trad Wife. The beginning of the book is extremely similar, though Natalie is much more successful than Camille. Burke's version of a trad wife influencer deluding herself and lying to her followers about her supposedly perfect life is much better-written than Schrader's. But that's a double-edged sword, because it makes Natalie much more unlikable. She's an incredibly hatable character and the book is from her POV, and that makes a lot of the book not really enjoyable to read.
But the book turns out to be much more ambitious and clever than it seems at the beginning. When I finished it, I was glad I'd read it and appreciated it a lot. That being said, I enjoyed Trad Wife more on an emotional level.
I highly recommend not clicking on the cut unless you're 100% positive you'll never read the book. I really enjoyed the non-spoiled experience.
There is something off about Natalie's "1800s" life from the beginning, but it's not immediately clear exactly what as none of the obvious explanations quite fit. If she really time-traveled, then what's up with the bit of plastic she finds, why are they seemingly living in total isolation with no town anywhere near them, and why does her family speak in such a modern way? If the whole thing is a delusion, why is it so detailed and non-escapist? If it's reality TV, why is she literally kidnapped? And for all of those possibilities, what happened to her pregnancy?
What is actually going on is that it's fifteen years since the last thing she remembers. Back when she had the farm, she tried to strangle an employee who had an affair with her husband, it became a huge scandal, her husband's senator father threatened to have her killed, and in a desperate attempt to escape everything, she had the house retrofitted to actual 1800s standards and has been living there with her horrible husband and the four more kids she had after that, while pretending to the kids that it's the 1800s!
Periodically she goes (even more) nuts/amnesiac and blanks out the previous fifteen years. Her husband and parentified older daughter are used to this and regularly drug her into submission, which is undoubtedly doing wonders for her sanity.
MEANWHILE, her oldest daughter from the influencer life has been trying to rescue the younger kids! Since she can't do anything legally (it's not illegal in America to medically neglect your children or raise them to believe insane things), she waits till they're old enough to legally make some decisions, then swoops in, reveals the real world to them, and takes them in if they're willing to go.
The end, where we get some narrative from the parentified "1800s" daughter, five years after she was rescued by her older sister, is very moving and shows that Burke has real range as a writer. I'd have enjoyed a whole novel about her.
Content notes: Domestic violence, rape (on-page, graphic), child abuse and neglect, farm animal neglect/poor caretaking (just mentioned), gaslighting, non-consensual drugging, current American right-wing stuff.
While attempting to buy Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife, I accidentally bought a different novel called Trad Wife by Michelle Brandon. And Sarah Langan is coming out with yet another book called Trad Wife in September. I am now on a mission to read all four trad wife books, to compare and contrast.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
It reminds me of a video series on insta, but I can't remember the creator and googling descriptions just brings up horrific news articles.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Thank you for doing this so we don't have to!
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
(I wasn't sure about the "accuse Natalie of being a lesbian" bit and how much was meant to be in the text versus how much was a deliberately chosen slur to rile up the right wing. Natalie did seem to have an odd relationship to heterosexual sex, but then her husband was so aggressively hopeless)