TRAD WIFE
SARAH LANGAN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From the three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Good Neighbors comes a chilling tale of a journalist's descent into horror as she uncovers the dark secrets behind a trad wife influencer, blending suspense with a critique of modern femininity and the manipulative forces of social media.
Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven perfect children, and a life of from-scratch meals and pastoral bliss, she’s an icon of modern femininity. But behind every perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror.
Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and picture-perfect poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes.
She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.
There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it’s waiting just for Jenny. Trad Wife will make you question what’s real and what’s just a perfectly curated deception…
Will you see the lie?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Kind of resembles Yesteryear from the outside, with a malevolent animating force protecting Mia the trad wife and punishing Jenny the exposé-hunting journalist.
Jenny's been disgraced so is looking to this sitting-duck trad wife minor celeb to rebuild trust she lost from her audience of me-clone readers. Yes, I'd read Jenny's hit piece to revel in the fakery and façade-busting of someone whose presentation of self I strongly dislike and disapprove of.
Except there's a reason Jenny lost it all. There are many things Author Langan kinda tosses in and around that could be deeply offensive to people in their oddly missing narrative purpose in the story. I'm thinking most strongly of the sexual abuse of a minor. The cancer that's chucked into the grinder is pretty bothersome, too, though not for as powerful a reason.
Most troubling to me, however, as the craft failures throughout: action stopping for Jenny to follow an obsessive, destructive rumination of Jarron (her ex) enough times I wanted to give her my therapist's name was chief among these. I'm familiar with obsession and its attendant foreclosures of attention. As the PoV character's frequent emotional state, it just won't move things forward in a horror story, a cardinal sin; even in domestic suspense, it ends up making Jenny feel a bit too victimish as she's doing it to herself.
Almost as unhappy-making is the amount of time I'm reading Jenny's notes in italics immediately after the action she took notes on finishes. It is another way to stop the action dead. I was mildly amused once, maybe twice, by including call-outs to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions in their entirety. But here again, the action comes to a screeching halt. There are enough moments where this occurs for me to find it obtrusive and a problem for my desire to continue the read.
But I did, and finished it because Black Swan Farm was a nicely evoked backdrop for what should've been a faster-paced suspenseful story of comeuppance and redemption.
