Review: "The Ginghams" by T.C. Kemper

The Ginghams by T.C. Kemper
Published July 2026 via Henry Holt and Co.
★★★★

Joni's excited to get home from camp and see her best friend, May, again—except, when she gets home, May has changed. The town has changed. And not, Joni fears, for the better.

Now, I read this because—bear with me—I've been down a trad-wife-thriller rabbit hole lately, and something told me that this might be the middle grade version of that. And I was right, or right enough for my (very arbitrary) purposes, which made this a super fun comparison point.

As a middle grade read, this feels just right. Joni is stubborn and sometimes a bit rash, but her heart is in the right place. There's a clear villain (we'll come back to this in a moment), and a fair amount of action, including a bit of blood (the ears, oh gosh), and a librarian who is part of the resistance, as a middle school librarian should be. I'm reminded a bit of Eventown, though The Ginghams is a fair bit darker.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking, while reading this, about ways in which this book might be different if it were written for an older audience. The first thing is religion—there's no mention of religion here, though there are clear influences from certain parts of white American evangelical Christianity (and of course the Stepford wives). In that way the book feels a bit sanitized for a younger audience, but in a way that is fair. Interesting to see, though, that one of Joni's friends is queer-coded without being explicitly identified as gay, and that's something that the bad guys pick up on too (to them it's officially a problem of standing out, but we all know where their real prejudice lies...)

And the second thing is how the bad guys are structured. Again, The Ginghams has a pretty clear villain here, which feels appropriate for middle grade. It becomes obvious farily early that there's an element of force to the changes in town: the people taking on new views and new personalities do not have a choice in it. And yet again, I think this makes sense for a middle grade read. But there's an extent to which this makes it a much less alarming read for me as an adult—it's one thing to have one main bad guy who is controlling the people around him, one main bad guy who can be vanquished. In a book for older readers, I would expect much more of an element of choice to it—imagine how much more difficult it would be for characters to come out of this book knowing that their fathers and mothers and friends had chosen to go down this track. (Do I have to watch The Stepford Wives now? I've never seen it, and I don't know where it falls on this.) Women choosing to give up their rights and men choosing to exert total control on women and girls is far more terrifying than a clear bad guy who can be vanquished.

Because The Ginghams is a middle grade novel, this is all fine, of course; I'm pushing the boundaries of what is on topic because I have tangential interests! Given the recent rise of trad wife thrillers (and everything that is the contemporary mashup of politics and contemporary religion), I would not be surprised to see more along these lines in the near future.

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