I watched through the mirror as Clementine crossed the room and sat next to the girls on my bed.

What does tradwife mean?

Hello and welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton.

Who said that word to you?

Today, yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Tradwife, Jessa said and giggled.

She threw her head back and said it again.

Tread wife.

It almost seemed possible Clementine might hear the mechanical clicks of my brain as it

whirred into warp speed, sorting through 500 possible answers to that question.

My eldest daughter was like me, not just in likeness, but in disposition too.

She held her intelligence like a knife behind her back.

Now that she was creeping toward womanhood, I found our similarities a bit unnerving, like watching a clone of

myself walk slowly toward me from a faraway point in the distance. What would happen when she arrived?

I'm aware this isn't the kind of thing you're meant to feel about your own daughter.

But motherhood is its own kind of curation.

Which is to say, every woman I know lied to me about what it would be like before I became one myself.

Right, now, Natalie Heller is a tradwife influencer online.

She's got the perfect life, a brood of beautiful children and a handsome cowboy husband who eat her homemade bread and jams in their gorgeous red barn.

What her millions of followers don't know is that she's got a whole army of hidden staff

and industrial kitchen appliances helping her out. Then one day, she wakes up in the 1800s and is

forced to live this traditional fantasy for real. You will not see the mad twist in this book coming. I blimming well didn't. It's absolutely

...