Review: "Trad Wife" by Sarah Langan

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
Published September 2026 via Atria Books
★★★★

And we're back on the trad wife book train! In Trad Wife (not to be confused with Tradwife or The Trad Wife), Jenny's writing career has just imploded, and in a last-ditch effort to save it, she takes on a challenge: She'll spend a week with one of the country's most popular trad wives, Mia, and write about the experience. It'll be a close-up view of a life much of the country is desperate to get closer to, and a view that few people get. Under the circumstances, whatever she writes is likely to go viral. What she doesn't know is just how Wrong life at Black Swan Farm is.

Now. This is one in a string of trad wife books that I've read, and I don't want to go into detail on differences just yet, because there are still a few more in my queue (I do love a theme). One thing that has struck me, though, is that a disproportionate number of the protagonists are journalists or journalist-adjacent. I imagine part of this is simply because the world of influencing overlaps with the world of reporting (whether this should be the case is another question entirely), and part of it is because "writer investigating something weird" is a solid way to get someone unconnected with a particular world involved in it...but it's still odd to me.

This is one of those with a journalist, of course, and also one of those where the journalist goes in expecting to write some big exposé. In this case, Jenny thinks that her exposé is going to be partly about abuse—abuse of Mia or abuse of Mia's children or possibly both—but the truth goes far deeper, and far weirder, than she can possibly imagine.

For the most part I like Jenny. Her decisions aren't always the best, but to be fair, she didn't expect to land in a story with supernatural elements. Those supernatural elements are not really my favourite—personal preference, but supernatural stories just aren't as alarming to me as things that can happen in real life (see: trad wives), and so instead of making a story more creepy to me, they make the story rather less creepy. But so far, this is pretty high on my list of this weird and wild subgenre. 3.5 stars and one to read if you've read Yesteryear, of course, or if you haven't but are curious about what might happen if ballerinafarm got...weird. (Or maybe just weirder than it already is.)

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