I had heard so much hype about this book and a couple of people told me it was exactly my thing so I thought I had better read it sooner rather than later. I need to discuss it in person with people who have also read it, because it boggled me a bit.
One thing you might not know about me is that I have a special interest in Christian fundamentalists. I did Theology and Religious Studies at university which I think is a big part of it. I have kept an eye on families like the Duggars, the Collins, Ballerina Farm and so on ever since. I belong to forums where we discuss these families and how gross they are for what they believe in.
There has been a rise in Christian fascism over the past decade and a half, and it has meant that we ended up with Trump in the White House. Twice. The fact they love him is absolutely boggling because he is everything they are supposedly against - but he isn't a mixed race woman so they voted for him over Kamala Harris because they really hate women and they really hate people who aren't white, so she's a double whammy. They are behind the rise of Zionism in the US and increasingly in the UK too. It's scary. It's easy to look at their cute kids, perfect kitchens, and modest dress, and think that they aren't that dangerous. But they have LOT of power, money, and influence, and they are scary. I loathe them, of course. They are antithesis to everything I believe in.
Enter Caro Claire Burke and her novel, which is about a tradwife called Natalie. She is from a somewhat fundamentalist home and was brought up by her mother with her sister. Her dad left the family but everyone pretended he was dead and the family moved, so that the mother could keep respectability. Natalie wears somewhat modest clothing when she's at college and judges her roommate dreadfully because she has sex and is just a normal eighteen year old but like whatever, Natalie is incredibly judgemental.
Natalie meets Caleb, whose dad is a senator or something. The family is incredibly wealthy and Caleb is the fifith of five sons and is, honestly, just incredibly thick. I feel like his dad has spent a lot of time bailing him out of trouble. But Natalie knows she can mould Caleb into the alpha male she wants him to be. She sells him on the idea of a ranch, where he will be the boss, and she will stay at home with the children and drink raw milk (they are all obsessed with raw milk). She sells him on this and ends up leaving college before the end of her second year so they can get married and she can have her first baby.
Fifteen years later she is living the dream. Allegedly. She has a handful of children, another one on the way, and she has Help. She has two nannies, a bunch of ranch hands to do the actual work since Caleb can't, and a social media manager. She shares recipes on her blog and films A LOT with her children. We've seen how this can go with the likes of Ruby Franke. She is small minded and judgemental; she meets up with a girl she went to school with in the supermarket and is certain that this woman is incredibly jealous of her.
One of my problems with Natalie is that I think Caro Claire Burke gave her much more credit than many of these women are due. She is clever - she gets into Harvard for goodness sake - and very self aware. A lot of these women in these cults just aren't that clever. They have fully bought in to the ideologies of the cult - they genuinely believe that women are inferior to men, that they need to have as many children as possible, that their men are heads of the households, that women shouldn't preach in church, that they need to cover their elbows, knees, heads, lest they lead men astray etc. I don't think that Natalie really DID believe those things; she was just using them to get what she wanted out of life.
Anyway, one day she wakes up, and it's 1855. She is stuck in the mid 19th century with children she doesn't recognise and a man that is surely not Caleb although he looks kind of similar. You'd think she'd love this - she gets to go back to all the things that she wants! But of course, she doesn't. It's incredibly inconvenient to live a life where there is no indoor plumbing, where all food has to be made from scratch, and where medicine is limited and there's a very real chance that one of your children might die.
She tries to escape and can't. The book switches between times periods - Natalie is stuck in 1855 but then she recounts what has happened for the last twenty years back in modern times. It's obvious that the two strands will come together but I wasn't sure how exactly. And I don't think the pay off was worth it. It sort of felt like Caro Claire Burke had had this great idea to write a book about a woman like Ruby Franke or Ballerina Farm or whatever, but hadn't quite worked out what she wanted to say. I didn't hate the ending buuuut it was a bit odd.
I also think that Caro Claire Burke does herself have some really anti feminist views and these peeped through fairly often. Obviously Natalie is anti feminist and obviously she's also an unreliable narrator but there were bits that weren't her point of view that were just really anti women. So I didn't like that. In all I'm giving this three out of five. It was interesting and I'm glad to have read it, and I would like more discussions about it, but I didn't love it.
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