Book Review: ‘Trad Wife’ by Saratoga Schaefer (the horrors of being a woman)

I recently read Caro Claire Burke’s ‘Yesteryear’ which tackles the trad wife influencer trend in a very different way to Saratoga Schaefer’s horror, ‘Trad Wife’.

Camille lives to embody a traditional lifestyle and wants to emulate her social media icon, Mara Shoemaker, who has millions of followers dedicated to questionable advice about folic acid and the right way to be a woman. In order to increase her own following and get her marriage back on track, Camille needs a baby and she needs a baby now.

When Camille makes a wish at a crumbling well on her property for her baby, she starts to be haunted with dreams she feels are divine. When she’s visited by a horrifically angelic creature, her new announcement finally goes viral. As her pregnancy gains her a new burst of popularity and gains her friendship with Mara, she brushes off the increasingly concerning symptoms of her pregnancy that aren’t quite normal…

With Camille, Schaefer does something really interesting with the trad wife aspect: Camille is a trained scientist and she knows that what she’s being told, and promoting in turn, is not correct and sometimes not safe, but she does it anyway to fit in her with chosen community. She’s a really interesting character and it’s fascinating to see what led her into this life, and how just a few small decisions and some alternate influences in her life would have taken her in a completely different direction.

It was very easy to hate Camille for a lot of the novel, but ‘Trad Wife’ ended up doing something that ‘Yesteryear’ didn’t: it highlighted the social landscape that helped Camille into this position and didn’t maker her the sole villain of the story. The men in Camille’s life are vile, in particular her husband and father. They are very conservative and religious, thinking a woman’s place is in the home and the kitchen serving her husband or father; science is not a respectable interest for a woman.

‘Trad Wife’ paints a broader picture of the trials and traumas of womanhood in a much more nuanced way that in ‘Yesteryear’ and highlights how while there are definitely a lot of villains in the trad wife space, a lot of the evil surrounding it is layered in sexism, misogyny and religious extremism in society.

Watching her unravel her beliefs as her pregnancy progresses and she gives birth was a bit of a victory for Camille and I began to not just feel sorry for her, but take back her power. The horror elements in the latter half of the novel are pretty visceral with a whole lot of body horror and blood. It’s a very vivid portrayal of the physical ways that women are harmed by men, society and the things that they are supposed to revere: motherhood and birth.

Thank you to NetGalley and Transworld Digital for the review copy.