Annabel

So the novel has an absolutely cracking premise.

Like Trad Wives is sort of like an online movement, some influencers doing it where you kind of you're a married lady and you retreat into kind of old-fashioned gender roles within your marriage and you take pride in, you know,

scrubbing things by lamplight and, you know, doing smocking and, you know, growing your own root crops and stuff like that.

And then you put it all and you wear kind of prairie dresses and bake your own bread and, you know, spend a lot of time with children, all that.

And it's a big sort of weird, like there's a bunch of influencers in the States that make a huge amount of money out of kind of posting on Instagram and doing how-to videos and stuff.

So this novel is about one of these influencers, a woman called Natalie, and the premise is kind of like on paper it's genius.

It's kind of like she wakes up one day and she's in the actual frontier kind of period and so she has to do it for real.

And I think what's happened with this book because the writer clearly sort of pitched it and it is a really smart premise because it allows her to kind of unpick all of these ideas about, you know, women's roles and what we idealise and what we perform for other people.

And I think that it's been picked up for a movie already and Anne Hathaway is, like, thanked in the credits of the book because she's been so helpful and helped workshop the book and will make the movie, you know, and all this stuff.

But I think...

The book itself is sort of a bit of a hot mess plot-wise.

Like they've kind of put a few too many plot twists in and so the interesting kind of issues that could be dealt with get a little bit swamped by all these sort of open questions that kept nagging at me as I read it.

I'm just like, I don't understand.

How has she woken up in the, you know, 1850s?

So...

But the fact that people are going off their chops about it in the nicest possible way, like it's not, I think, because it's a brilliantly written book.

It's because it's sort of jabbing into something that people are talking about or thinking about.

And...

Oddly enough, after I finished reading this book and I was sort of scratching my head about it, I listened to The Rest is Entertainment.

I'm back on Marina and Richard Jagg at the moment so fully.