The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, family vlogging channels, manosphere podcasts, and traditional values. Read this book before you take the exit onto that road.
Natalie Heller Mills has a beautiful, perfect life on a charming farm with a boisterous family and extremely successful Instagram account. Or at least she had all of those things, until the day she wakes up on a dreary, dangerous homestead surrounded by a family she doesn’t recognize having truly been transported into the past.
Guys…this book. There’s a pretty long tradition of stories about characters going down the proverbial rabbit hole, descending into madness or depression or destitution, but none of them have been quite like this. If you’ve ever seen the extremes of the alt-right and wondered to yourself how people end up that way, how they resolve the countless dissonances of their ideologies and their action, Natalie will be a fascinating character for you as she was for me. The emotional capacity of this story cannot be overstated, and it’s truly a rollercoaster. The longing, frustration, depression, and fear are freakishly vivid, to the extent that this story approaches thriller territory. At the end, as the reader I felt kind of bitterly amused sympathizing so much with such a deeply terrible person. Also, I cried 🙂
I like that this story didn’t limit itself to representing misogyny and traditional gender roles, but also explored the roles that faith, sex, social media, and politics (in the concrete sense, because Caleb’s father is a politician) play in creating spaces where political extremism thrive. I wish the author had gotten a little more into the racial aspect of this ideology because it’s clearly closely intertwined with white supremacy. It is mentioned a few times and that idea comes across but I would have liked more. I don’t want to say much about the later parts of the book because it’s crazy spoiler territory but I think some people will like the ending and some people won’t, and I have my qualms with it but I also don’t think it could/should have ended any other way.
If the premise sounds interesting to you, this book delivers and I highly recommend it! Also, if you read Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake and wanted more from the Tradwife plotline, this is EXACTLY what you need. I can’t wait for everyone else to get their hands on this and I look forward to seeing what Burke writes next!
Thank you to Caro Claire Burke and Knopf for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!
Happy reading!
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