"Recipe for a Perfect Wife" by Karma Brown

"Recipe for a Perfect Wife" by Karma Brown (who is Canadian! and like me, lives somewhere near Toronto -- Oakville, I think?) is an upcoming pick for my Clever Name book club, which has been on hiatus since before Christmas. I'm not sure if or when we'll resume our discussions -- but this was a book I'd been eyeing anyway, so I thought I'd pick it up for my next read.  

The story:  Alice Hale has just quit her publishing job to concentrate on writing a novel. (At least, that's the story she tells her husband, Nate...) He thinks it's the perfect time to move out of Manhattan, buy a house and start the family they've been talking about:  Alice can take care of the house and work on her novel while he commutes. Without her job, stuck in a slightly creepy fixer-upper house in the dreaded suburbs, and facing a severe case of writer's block, Alice flounders and feels stifled -- until the day she finds a vintage recipe book with handwritten notes in a box in the musty basement, and starts experimenting with some of the recipes (some of which are reproduced in the book -- chicken a la king, tuna casserole, baked Alaska and more!). 

From her next-door neighbour, a retired doctor named Sally, Alice learns more about the previous owner, a 1950s housewife named Eleanor (Nellie) Murdoch.  The story cuts back & forth between Alice in 2018 and Nellie in 1956. Like Alice, Nellie has secrets she's keeping from her abusive husband, Richard. Each chapter (whether about Alice or Nellie) is prefaced with a piece of advice from various early 20th-century marriage manuals -- some screamingly funny, some eye-rolling, some shudder-inducing.  

I'll be honest -- as I started this book, I wasn't sure what sort of a book this supposed to be or where the story was going. (And even after I finished it, I still wasn't quite sure... although I did guess where one plotline was going almost immediately from a clue provided early on.)  The cover design and back-cover description suggested it might be social satire. There were elements of suspense/thriller/the supernatural. (For example, the house is always chilly -- but the more Alice explores traditional homemaking, the warmer it becomes.). In some ways, I was reminded of "The Stepford Wives." 

It was thought-provoking and unsettling, with an ending that was somewhat ambiguous -- and disturbing.  It left me thinking (and I suspect I'll be thinking about it for quite a while to come) --  about patriarchy and gender roles and women's empowerment -- about how much has changed since 1956 -- and how little.

This was a hard one to rate. The premise was really interesting (and well executed) and the writing was good -- but I closed the book feeling a tad queasy.  3.5 stars. I debated whether that should be rounded up to 4 or down to 3 on Goodreads. I'm making it 3, for now anyway.  I can see this being a great book to discuss in a book club! -- lots of fodder for discussion!   

Content warnings (with some potential spoilers):  pregnancy, childlessness, miscarriages, abortion, maternal ambivalence and domestic violence. 

This was Book #12 read to date in 2022 (and Book #1 finished in March), bringing me to 27% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."