I’ll say this upfront: I picked this one up out of pure curiosity, and I could not put it down.
If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last few years, you’ve encountered the tradwife phenomenon. The aesthetic is seductive: beautiful kitchens, homemade bread, an air of effortless domestic grace. Tradwife takes that world and asks a very satisfying question: what’s actually going on behind closed doors?
The answer, in Crystal Harbor, is quite a lot. This idyllic coastal town draws families drawn to its traditional values and slower pace of life. The women are immaculate, the bake sales are impeccable, and the Sunday churchgoing is strictly observed. But when one of the husbands goes missing and a buried secret starts to surface, the carefully maintained façade begins to crack, and three very different women find themselves at the center of it all.
Brandon is smart enough to give her characters real interiority. These aren’t cardboard cutouts of submissive housewives. Each of the three perspectives gives you a genuinely different experience of the same world, and as the layers peel back you start to understand how people end up in lives that look one way from the outside and feel entirely different from within.
The book leans into its more salacious elements with real commitment, and some of those revelations were a bit more sensational than what I’d usually reach for. But that’s also exactly what makes it the perfect beach read. This is a book that knows exactly what it is and fully commits to being that thing. Sometimes that’s precisely what you need.
