Review: "The Trad Wife" by Carrie Hughes

The Trad Wife by Carrie Hughes
Published May 2026 via Hera
★★★

Melissa's not living the trad wife life, not by a long shot—she's a single mother to a seven-year-old, living a fast-paced life in New York, and occasionally self-soothing by watching trad wife social media content. She even has a small-scale podcast on which she discusses not being a trad wife but trying to bring some of that vibe into her own life. Her favorite content creator is Faith, a woman living with her husband and six kids in rural Utah...and when Faith offers Melissa a job, well, it's too good an opportunity to pass up.

Except, of course, everyone has ulterior motives...not least Melissa.

Now. I went down a trad wife book rabbit hole recently, and this is one of the places I landed. This is not the first trad wife thriller I have read, and it won't be the last, and while it is fascinating to me that so many of these thrillers seem to have basically the same premise (podcaster/journalist investigates ballerinafarm-inspired influencer), that broader discussion will have to wait...because I have a whole (virtual) pile of books titled some variation of "The Trad Wife" to get through. And oh but I cannot tell you how excited I am to be able to discuss all of these as a batch.

But I digress. We're not there yet. In this particular narrative, Melissa is skeptical...to a point. From early on in the book, it's clear that she has something of a parasocial relationship with Faith; they've never met, but despite what Melissa knows about the realities of conservative religion and the lives of women whose freedom is curtailed by men, she idealizes Faith's more "wholesome", rural life: that Faith bakes her own bread, that her children never seem to throw tantrums, and on it goes.

It was clear to me early on that Melissa was maybe not...making the best decisions. She has reasons to want to leave her New York life, yes. She also has reasons to want to get close to Faith. But once she's actually out in Utah, her freedoms disappearing one by one (or perhaps dozen by dozen), she's deeply passive. Shut down her podcast? Okay, whatever, she can start it again later. Hired for videography and editing, but her duties include cow-milking? Well, okay, everyone has to pitch in. Shamed for buying store-bought dairy products and told to drink unpasteurized milk? Well, Faith does look healthy... Hand her child over for unaccredited homeschooling that mostly consists of force-feeding religion down the kids' throats? No biggie, they'll just listed to some extra Taylor Swift. Not allowed to learn to drive? Well! She'll have to put her foot down about that!

Now, there's a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek—there's a reference to the Australia mushroom murders, for example, and of course the whole thing is heavily inspired by, well, social media trends of today. (See: unpasteurized milk. Y'all, pasteurization is literally just heating up milk to kill off bad bacteria. Save yourself and your kids from potential, and potentially dangerous, food poisoning!) But Melissa is also maybe not the brightest bulb in the box, and by the time she realizes that every other adult on the property also has ulterior motives, she's in way deeper than she'd expected.

Melissa reads to me as, if not unhinged, having a screw or two loose—but as the book goes on it becomes clearer that a loose screw or two still puts her among the more stable adults around. I could have used, umm, a few more screwdrivers to go around, I think; the book escalates quickly, and gets a lot darker than I expected (except, still fast, so it didn't feel dark so much as a lot).

Content warnings for this one will likely be spoilery, so I'll put them in footnotes,* but if you're someone for whom content warnings influence reading decisions, I'd consider checking them first anyway.

So where does that leave us...? This is the third book in this general vein that I've read to date (see Yesteryear and Her Beautiful Life), and it's not my favorite. But it's doing some very specific things, and I am genuinely fascinated by the sudden appearance of this subgenre...and eager to see where other books on the topic go with it.

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

* Content warnings: heavy-handed toxic religion, mention of past rape, mention of past suicide, on-page sexual assault, on-page physical violence