Review: "Her Beautiful Life" by Brianna Labuskes

Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskes
Published January 2026 via Thomas & Mercer
★★★★

Holland hasn't spoken to Cat in years, not since they lived together in Savannah. Those days, Cat was an up-and-coming chef, irreverent, biting, with no interest in being tied down. Now she's Catriona, a successful tradwife influencer with a passel of children. And Holland finally has a reason to reach out again—and the chance to check whether, really, Cat is okay. Because the Cat she knew would never in a lifetime willingly subject herself to this tradwife life. And she misses the Cat she knew.

It was so strange how much leeway society gave us to mourn romantic relationships but then acted like breakups between friends just never happened or never affected anyone if they did. They could be just as—or more—devastating. (146*)

Like Holland, I'm a little bit fascinated and a lot appalled by the rise of the tradwife movement. Unlike Holland, I don't know anyone who's actually living that life...but I'm intrigued by the parallel rise of the tradwife thriller, so here we are. The book is split between then and now, Holland's perspective and Cat's and that of the detective investigating when (not a spoiler) Cat's husband turns up dead.

The wife, Catriona, was a social media influencer, one of those women who pretended it was 1950 while ignoring the fact that, in 1950, she wouldn't have been allowed to have a career making a spectacle of herself for the public to consume. (2)

Catriona is compelling, electric, ambitious—and also impulsive, selfish, and jealous. Holland knows this; Catriona knows this; they both accept this as the status quo. So do most people in Catriona's life, honestly. Now...this isn't really a book about Catriona's tradwife life. I actually would have liked a bit more of that—the part of her life that Holland, who comes in as a journalist for this reconnection, is allowed to see is fairly limited, and although it's immediately clear to Holland that not everything is as Catriona presents to the Internet, it's all so curated that even Holland, with her inside knowledge, spends much of the book wrestling with what she should believe.

There are twists here, and some of those twists are big. I guessed one of the major ones fairly early on, but others, including related ones, I didn't see coming; better, because the end of the book is not reliant on twists so much as it is reliant on what will happen next and how far each individual character will go, I didn't know how the book would end until, well, the book ends. Love that although some information that the POV characters know is withheld until it's useful, that mostly doesn't happen in a "dun dun dun we're building this up" kind of way; the plotting is something fierce.

I'm not sure that the end would really be as final as it seems—numerous characters seem to be overlooking the use of forensic evidence and the impact that it might have on an investigation. There are also a number of unanswered questions about various relationships (e.g., why Catriona's husband isn't on good terms with his parents). But mostly this was just delightfully, compulsively readable.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.