(This book is available on Bookshop.)
Read time: 4 minutes
Tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills seems to have it all. She shows off her successful organic farm, cheerful children, home-cooked recipes and red-blooded provider of a husband to millions on social media, proving that the conservative American dream can be a reality.
Of course, real life is actually very different. The husband is a redpill boob, the children neglected brats, the food sucks, and the real work is all done by hired hands, nannies, and a pink-haired liberal producer. When Natalie suddenly wakes up in 1855 and has to be a tradwife for real, things get even more complicated.
This book has been riding high on the wave of a very timely concept and Anne Hathaway-helmed film option. It’s sparked some interesting discussions about gender politics and feminism, helped along by very simple writing reminiscent of Christian self-help books and a particularly nasty plot twist meant to drive its Aesop home hard.
But I can’t shake the feeling that ultimately this book hates women just as much as the movement it’s satirizing.
Every woman in this book is miserable, whether liberal or conservative. Harvard grad? Miserable. Full time mom? Miserable. Stupid women are miserable, smart women are miserable, and angry women are doubly miserable, but not quite as miserable as the nice women they torment with their opinions. Wife, sister, mistress, saint, girlboss, diva? All miserable.
In counterpoint, every man is rich, dumb and unpunished. I felt a little sick at how glibly the men in this book were enabled in their frankly evil behavior, and never really questioned once. They were assessed frankly, but never expected to be or do any better. The judgement is all reserved for the women suffering as a result of their selfish, ideologically bankrupt behaviour.
On top of this embarassingly enabling gender polemic, no one is actually given the courtesy of a viewpoint specific enough to feel truly meaningful. Natalie is a generic caricature of a conservative rural white lady from an unspecified but tacitly ridiculous religion. Geographically she should be probably be Mormon given the part of Idaho thish book is set in. However, her language and highly personalized prayer style seems evangelical, and her theology is very conservative Catholic. Despite all of the religious signaling, however, she doesn’t have a church. No pastor, priest or even well-meaning co-believer has a presence in her adult life. She’s apparently sustaining her fervrent faith with only fresh sourdough bread and stale platitudes. There’s no real sense of a larger world or any engagement with it in this book–Natalie and her family are simply embodied 2D stereotypes, flat and flimsy. Even when they venture off of the farm to a county fair, an Ivy league school or the vast world of the influencer internet, there’s really not much impact.
By the time we get to the twist (spoiler alert: it’s a psychotic episode, no real time travel involved) Natalie is more punching bag than person. She exists for readers to feel superior to, rather than as a reflection of the actual beliefs and existence of conservative white women. She’s basically a revenge fantasy, and a mean-spirited one, too.
There’s also quite a lot of be said of the grand old tradition of making the suffering of an insufferable woman implicitly her fault because of her mental health. Crazed women in the attic (or in this case, isolated off-grid ranch) are not a new thing in literature, but using it here is dismissive in a way that I feel is dangerous. It’s almost mocking. Political regression can’t be dismissed as simply insanity, and while I’m a big believer in laughing at the ridiculous, you can’t use “these people are just pathetic and crazy” as a complete explanation when they’re literally running the country unless you’re prepared for their crazy asses to lock you up for not being crazy too.
Also, you may have guessed and it goes without saying, but this book is super white. I hoped to gain some insight from it on what’s happening in America’s cultural bubbles, both right and left. Instead, I got a 400-page treatise on self-righteous mean-girlism. (Maybe that IS what’s happening?) I’ve never been so glad to be Black and weird and womanist in my life.
Also, you absolutely cannot knit with sewing needles and that part almost got the book returned.
Names in the Burn Book for Yesteryear.
(Fellow readers, whew. While I didn’t enjoy this book very much, I’m glad I read it because sometimes it’s just good to keep up with where the level of public discourse is at. Everybody’s talking about gender politics, but we’re all starting at different places and viewing through different lenses. I guess I learned something I wasn’t expecting from this. If you’d like to learn something you didn’t expect from a book, check out the picks in the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Just remember that everything you buy there earns us a little commission. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)
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