I found Nellie's story to be much more interesting. Nellie really just wants to be alone with her garden. She's so unhappy, but instead of communicating that to her husband, she just gets more resentful and keeps adding lies upon lies.īoth women resent their roles as 'housewives'. She's taken up smoking, but hides it from Nate.

She has never come clean to Nate about her job, and why she was fired. Instead she's sneaky, and that leads to big issues. She doesn't want to have a child right away, and can't tell Nate how she feels. She lies, and keeps lying and makes a heck of a lot of bad choices. At first I liked her, but as the story moves along, I found myself annoyed with her. Her life looks grand from the outside, but inside it's deeply troubling.Īlice. She thinks about her choices and regrets marrying Richard. That and her gardening she loves to garden and is very good at it. Her friendship with the woman next door is really the only thing that keeps her sane. She's trapped in an abusive marriage with very few options. The novel moves back and forth between the two women. She claims it's all for research on her novel, but wow, she starts to take on a lot of Nellie's personality. It's safe to say Nellie's spirit inhabits the home, and Alice slowly begins to immerse herself in the role of a housewife who gardens, cooks (out of Nellie's cookbook), and yes, even starts smoking again. While rummaging around in some boxes in the basement, she finds an old cookbook that belonged to Nellie. Alice and Nate buy the home Nellie had lived in 60 years before, and even though it needs a lot of work to modernize it, Nate loves it. Nate makes enough money that she can stay home and write her novel. She's a big city lady, and used to working a lot. Nate wants to move out of the city and start a family in a home set in the suburbs. He's not afraid to use some physical force to keep her in line.Īlice is a modern woman, who recently left her job in New York City under a cloud-although she's kept that bit of information from her husband Nate. He wants a wife who is pretty, looks perfect all the time, cooks, cleans, and has babies. Nellie is married to a man who swept her off her feet, and she quickly realizes he's not a nice man.

Both are living in the same home, and married. It's a dual storyline, between two women: Nellie in 1956, and Alice in 2018. It read very quickly, and I had a hard time putting it down.

I zipped through this novel in a day-my first of 2020.

Recipe for perfect wife