Recipe for a Perfect Wife

Picked this up as it was in library's the 'high demand' collection but happened to be available, so figured I'd see what the interest was. I knew absolutely nothing about the book, which was kind of great as I spent the whole book trying to figure out what was going to happen. Would it turn into a murder mystery? At least one character was certainly deserving of being murdered, and was also nasty enough to murder someone. Was it a ghost story? Was the house haunted? In the end, some of the things I guessed did come true but others did not and some of them seemed oddly teased but not fulfilled.

Trigger warning - the book contains scenes of domestic abuse and rape, so avoid if you need to.

It's a book told by two main characters, Alice (present day, married to Nate) and Nellie (1950s, married to Richard). Alice and Nate move into the house Nellie and Richard lived in, and find it being sold "as is" - including appliances, furniture, and boxes of old books and magazines and even some clothing, after the former owner passed away from cancer. Among the belongings, Alice finds an old cookbook that clearly belonged to Nellie and is filled with notes written by her and her mother. Alice starts trying the recipes and becoming slightly obsessed with Nellie and life in the 50s. When she asks the neighbour and discovers that the neighbour's mother had left behind a collection of letters that Nellie had written to her mother back in the 1950s, Alice starts reading through them and trying to read between the lines to figure out what was actually happening in Nellie's life. Meanwhile we flash back to the 50s regularly to meet Nellie directly, finding that what she thought was a dream marriage to a man who'd swept her off her feet is in fact not the fairy tale romance she thought it would be. As Richard becomes abusive and manipulative, she tries to find ways to keep control of her life and protect herself within the very limited power that a woman in the 1950s was allowed.

As both women try to turn the house into a home and try for a pregnancy, the book's an interesting contrast of how much life has changed for women in just a half century; and also how, to some extent, expectations haven't changed much at all in some areas.

I liked quite a lot about the book, and it was an easy read. But what I disliked made it difficult to like the whole book overall. First and biggest problem, Alice is just awful. She makes stupid decisions, lies about things constantly, pretty much deliberately screws up her own life and her husband's with her own terrible selfishness, and then we're supposed to identify and sympathize with her? No, sorry, Alice lost me before the book was even half over. The only reason I kept going was reason 2, I was wondering if a thing was going to happen but it turned out I was wrong and it did not. Hidden for spoilers of what didn't happen - Alice's behaviour became so irrational and changed (wildly veering from loving the city to loving the suburbs, from hating cooking to becoming a happy housewife getting dinner on the table every evening, from wearing jeans to buying vintage 50s outfits and starting smoking using Nellie's cigarette holder - that I thought perhaps the house was somehow haunted and possessing the modern day couple. Nate also starts acting a bit possessively and a little more reminiscent of Richard in a couple places, and there are also descriptions of how the house itself seems to be happier once Alice starts to act more like a 50s housewife - how the weird noises stop and the heating starts to work properly again only once she starts cooking from the old cookbook. The excuse for Alice's awful and irrational behaviour could have been that the house was somehow influencing her and this was going to turn out to be some kind of supernatural/ghost story. But no! Despite ALL sorts of little hints and implications about it like the ones listed above, this plot hook goes absolutely nowhere, Alice apparently just inexplicably decides she wants to start dressing exclusively in vintage clothing and wearing stockings to breakfast, and wtf? It felt like the author was setting this up fairly extensively and then completely let it drop. And without that explanation for Alice being a completely irrational idiot, there's really no forgiving her.

Anyway, if you're a fan of 50s era stories and/or main characters who are horrible and sabotage themselves and their entire plot, pick this book up.