Tradwife – TC Parker

3 stars

Tradwife wasn’t what I was expecting. From the synopsis, I was expecting a horror filled read about author Gina Lewis’ descent into a darkening community of murder and mayhem. While I thought the format of a book within a book was unique, I didn’t get the horror mayhem that I was expecting.

This book sets itself up as a very interesting fiction non-fiction “true crime” story, and I fell into it more as a mystery rather than a horror. Because I was so focused on the whodunnit factor and was reading it as I would a murder mystery/thriller, I missed out on the feminine rage and righteous fury that I was supposed to feel.

I was really surprised that Gina was able to dig up anything about Becky and Shannon’s juvenile records, let alone have any intention of publishing those into public record. This could just be a disconnect between justice systems in different countries, but juvenile records are typically sealed and inaccessible without a Court order unsealing them. Any juvenile criminal history or detention shouldn’t be public record of any kind or readily available for someone to find, so that took me out of the story a lot.

Living in a country where you grow up hearing senastionalized stories of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, The Boston Stangler, etc. and where it seems every day there’s a new story on the news of a school shooting or a mass killing, this didn’t hit as hard as I think it was intended. While the actions done by those integral to the Tradwife commune in this story were horrible, it felt more abstract to me because the story of the murders was told as something that had already happened and that I should already be familiar with.

It was also hard for me to get into this entirely with all the potshots taken at America throughout the book. Mentions of twisted American ideals, how racist America is, blaming the American woman for bringing her overlyreligious, bible-thumping American values to her husband, etc. made me feel like the author was focusing more on hating America than articulating how these couples ended up graphically murdered. These problems exist in just about every culture and, while America unfortunately may be the loudest about it, it’s not the only place that these issues have been present and horrible things have been done in the name of.

While a poignant story of what can happen when traditional values are taken to the extreme, I just couldn’t immerse into this as much as I thought I would. I had too many hangups on certain things in the story that made it hard for me to fully enjoy it. I felt too much time was spent bashing on America and the traditional marriage community as a whole, rather than focusing on how this group twisted those values to the extreme and corrupted them from what they originally stood for.

Even I, one of the most independent women I know, have days where I’d like nothing more than for someone to take care of everything so I can stay home and not have any worries, but that doesn’t make me a terrible human being or a traitor to my gender. It just makes me human. While a Tradwife lifestyle definitely wouldn’t be my choice, as Joanna said in the book, it’s still a choice that women are able to make for a variety of reasons and nothing to be ashamed of unless it gets corrupted like what happened in this commune.

This one didn’t necessarily hit for me, but I can definitely see where it would resonate for others.