I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
I don’t know what to say. It’s going to be really hard to not say a lot that spoils this book, but I have so many questions and ultimately feel dissatisfied with how Brandon went about ending this. And the reveals/twists after a while had me going really? And there were so many plot holes going on that I just stopped counting after a while. I think that the multiple POVs in this one ultimately hurt it, along with a murder mystery that in the end turned this into a different book.
Tradwife follows three women (Jennifer, Ariel, and Miranda) who are living in their special little community, Crystal Harbor, in Florida. Readers are introduced at the beginning to a body on the beach that someone knows is there, and it’s implied this community is keeping secrets. From there the book shifts to the three women who are all starting to feel stifled by the expectations of the community, their husbands, and other women. Jennifer is divorced and is a former tradwife dealing with the fact she has no education, no money of her own, and is barely making ends meet. Her husband has remarried and still treats her cruelly. When Jennifer finally decides she has enough, she takes to TikTok to share the horror of being a tradwife. Ariel is a former Broadway star, full-time mother to I think it was 5 children and is always ready to cook, clean, and have sex with her husband on command. Miranda is the second wife to the mayor of Crystal Harbor. She longs for her life back in New York before she moved here, but is determined to fit in, and cause some trouble.
I have to say upfront none of the women really get developed beyond a surface level in this book. The mystery/murder plot takes up the back half and really throws things off and you are left wondering what the heck you were reading this whole time, a send up of tradwives or a really bad thriller? I also have to say because of Jennifer’s subplot (divorced and shunned by members of the community now) she kept feeling like she was in a separate book. It was very obvious (to me anyway) who she was talking about in the book (she keeps going on about not naming her ex husband’s new wife’s name) but it felt like Brandon thought she was going to shock readers with it. Ariel and Miranda at least share scenes and have some dialogue (not that great either) but at least it seems focused on the mystery aspect of the book that Brandon wanted to lean more into. But then I thought the whole reveal with one of these women made absolutely no sense and I was fed up by the time I got to the end.
The flow was pretty bad. You have Jennifer’s POVs focusing on the rules of being a tradwife at the top of each chapter and her life and how she let her ex take over everything. Ariel is feeling lost but determined to keep doing what she’s doing. And Miranda was just a mess. The book just kept having really big stops and starts up until the end.
The setting of Crystal Harbor I found a bit hard to believe. Everyone there is wealthy, all went to school together, all still talk, but some people are hiding a big secret? I legit wish the mystery aspect had been left out since it felt ham-fisted to have some big dark cloud going on, but everyone stayed around. I don’t know, it just didn’t feel believable.
The ending though I called crap on too. I just wish that authors would even look up police procedures. I don’t think the police are great or anything. But there were too many things left unasked/unanswered and we are supposed to believe everyone was like yep that makes sense? Also, if everyone was as powerful and influential as they were supposed to be, how the heck did some of these people even get in trouble? And outside of some surface level stuff, it didn’t seem to me that the book really explored what a tradwife is and why so many women in this country embraced it. Ariel’s character gives you some hint of this, she’s doing videos to get money showing off her cooking and products. But other than that, it really didn’t go into that whole persona that mostly well to do women are playing at on social media.
- Joker – comedy; Batman’s nemesis; wild card; a book with a character that should have been taken seriously; gambling; taking a chance; who was that joker? We find out in the end that everyone took a character at face value and instead should have taken them seriously.
