The novel is a dual-narrative: we bounce between Alice and Nellie’s lives as they both try to adjust to the role of housewife in two different eras.īoth Nellie and Alice’s lives are great on paper, but once you pull it back, cracks start to show.
They buy the fully-furnished house of Nellie Murdoch, who lived there with her husband in the 1950s. In 2018, Alice Hale is a late-20s New Yorker married to the love of her life, moving to the suburbs to write a book as he is in an upwardly mobile career as an actuary. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting my day job to go into marketing. Dutton Book calls it Women’s Fiction, which is an (annoying) marketing ploy, but I’d call it a domestic mystery. It isn’t chick-lit, and it isn’t literary fiction, and it touches on issues of feminism but only a little. It isn’t really a thriller, though there are some thriller aspects. Review: Fair warning - this is going to be a difficult one for me to review, both because we are spoiler-free and because even though I’ve been thinking about it since I started it, I’m not sure how to classify it. Trigger warnings: domestic abuse, rape, murder When Alice uncovers a more sinister-even dangerous-side to Nellie’s marriage, and has become increasingly dissatisfied with the mounting pressures in her own relationship, she begins to take control of her life and protect herself with a few secrets of her own. Soon Alice learns that while baked Alaska and meatloaf five ways may seem harmless, Nellie's secrets may have been anything but. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she realizes that within the cookbook’s pages Nellie left clues about her life-including a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to her mother. But when she finds a vintage cookbook buried in a box in the old home's basement, she becomes captivated by the cookbook’s previous owner-1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch.
Synopsis: When Alice Hale leaves a career in publicity to become a writer and follows her husband to the New York suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. “Recipe for a Perfect Wife” by Karma Brown
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