This is a Karma Brown book, after all, and as her passionate following can attest, she’s a writer whose trademark is sincerity, and who takes her characters seriously to the point of earnestness. I loved doing them, but to be honest, I needed a break.”īut Recipe for a Perfect Wife is not, as you may have already gathered, a romp-y romance, comedy of manners or thriller, although it does have a touch of domestic noir, dialled back from earlier, decidedly more supernaturally inclined drafts.

“Most of my other books are ‘tissues required,’ so it was fun for me to break out of writing those really sad stories.

“No one’s crying in this book,” Brown says matter-of-factly over the phone from her home outside of Toronto. To readers familiar with Brown’s work, such as The Choices We Make and The Life Lucy Knew, that synopsis might already feel like a departure from the tender, moving work she’s known for (“An emotional story of love, loss and healing” would serve as appropriate cover copy for any one of her four bestselling novels.) While Recipe for a Perfect Wife is certainly not lacking in gut-wrenching scenes, including abuse, rape and murder, it is less about riding the emotional roller coaster with Brown than it is engaging in a conversation with her as she tackles the knottier issues of gender stereotypes, female agency and just how many questionable decisions are acceptable in the pursuit of self-discovery. Add two unlikeable-for-different-reasons husbands, a hearty helping of white lies that turn into whopping untruths, a sadness that seems to weep from the very walls of this home, and you get a discomfiting, page-turning read. The constant is the suburban New York dwelling they both live in – and, of course, the fact that they’re both trying to figure out what they want from life, a desire increasingly at odds with what all the people around them seem to want for (and from) them. The result of that thought experiment is Recipe for a Perfect Wife, which tells two stories in parallel: Nellie, a thoroughly Stepford-ian housewife circa 1950, and Alice, the 29-year-old woman who reluctantly decamps New York with her husband in the present day. Log In Create Free AccountĮach one of bestselling author Karma Brown’s books begins with a “what if.' In the case of her latest novel, that question was: “What if two women, living 50 years apart, with a shared cookbook between them, lived in the same house, both with secrets?”

Recipe for a perfect wife karma brown