Very late at night, I got peer pressured into reading His Vengeful Tradwife by Katie Landry. It was weird and I was very “what did I just read?” LB did me a great kindness and picked up His Vengeful Tradwife and sent me their reactions as they read. It really helped me process how I felt about this book. Things started well, though LB noted that this book is aggressively white and heteronormative. Maverick is an idiot and Tallulah is clearly smarter and more competent. Amanda, the other woman, is a cartoon of a career woman. So the part where Tallulah gives Maverick what he says he wants is fun and scratches a particular itch.
When LB got to the cruise that they all take with his parents and her father and step mother, I started to remember the ickiest stuff. (The way I was able to read fantasy and science fiction as a teen in the 1980s was to ignore a lot of really gross stuff. I was getting my books from my dad, so I didn’t know about a lot of women who were writing at the time. Anne McCaffrey and Robin McKinley were the only two women I remember reading at that time. So, my brain is very good at erasing things I don’t like, and I am working on not doing that.) With the exception of Tallulah, all the characters are cartoons, and increasingly flat and weird. Maverick’s parents are bizarre. They do a strange “emergency psychoanalysis” that as far as I can tell they have no credentials for, is wildly inappropriate, and also, not actually how psychoanalysis works. And as LB pointed out to me, ableist. Around this point I remembered the only characters of color in the story – the volleyball players. I told LB that they might not want to read the weird sex scene between Tallulah and four volleyball players, and they agreed that they had read enough.
There is quite a bit of sex. They both have sex with other people. But it’s not especially interesting. A good sex scene tells you about the characters and relationship. It’s all kind of boring and gross.
One of the things I had been trying to process was, is this stealthily undermining patriarchal structures, or does it allow readers to take a transgressive vacation and come back home to traditional gender roles? Mostly it does the second. Tallulah’s family remains intact and the career woman gets punished. Where it stays a little subversive is that Tallulah is the breadwinner at the end of the book.
Anyway, always have your own money.
