Characters often face difficult choices--and learn how to live with the consequences--in the novels of Karma Brown (The Choices We Make). Over the course of four books, she has tackled the subjects of women's friendships, parenting, love and loss, the nature of memory and the precariousness of enduring secrets. In Recipe for a Perfect Wife, she builds upon some of these themes, chronicling the lives of two women who lived nearly 60 years apart.
In 2018, 29-year-old Alice Hale and her husband, Nate, move from a "shoebox-size" apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan to a house in Greenville, a suburban town "less than an hour's train ride from the city and yet an entirely different world." Nate admires the sprawling colonial revival built in the 1940s; it has a distinctive stone archway, classic layout and a backyard perfect for children to play ball in one day. Alice, however, sees the endless amount of work that needs to be done on the retro fixer-upper. Despite her apprehensions, she sacrifices and makes the adjustment.
While Nate commutes to his city job as an actuarial analyst, Alice, having left her career in public relations to write a novel, feels left behind, rattling around the big, empty house. Separated from city friends, Alice's loneliness deepens--as does her writer's block--especially when Nate starts pressuring Alice to start a family. She's just not ready yet. When Alice finds a vintage cookbook in the basement and begins whipping up some of the recipes, her anxiety and depression start to lift. She becomes intrigued and wants to find out all she can about Nellie Murdoch, the previous owner of the cookbook and the house.
Alice learns that a year before she and Nate moved to Greenville, Nellie "passed away and left the house and her estate to her lawyer to handle." She had no family. Why? As Alice re-creates the dishes--Tuna Casserole, Chicken á la King, Baked Alaska--she begins to piece together Nellie's life from notes scribbled in the cookbook, unsent letters Nellie penned to her mother, and through remembrances of Nellie by a neighbor who shared Nellie's affinity for gardening. In the secondary narrative that unravels in the mid-1950s--scenes espousing the expected mores of the generation--Nellie emerges as a smart yet inhibited woman stuck in a stifling, frightful marriage.
As Alice learns more about Nellie's life, she faces unexpected crises in her own that force her to rethink choices she's made, secrets she's kept and actions she may need to take in the future. Patriarchal dilemmas abound for both women. Yet, through the wisdom evoked by revelations in Nellie's life story, Alice is suddenly inspired and empowered better to deal with her own challenges.
Strong, well-drawn women anchor Brown's deeply thought-provoking, feminist novel. The spellbinding dual stories complement each other, raising themes of self-discovery, self-preservation and liberation for two women living eras apart. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Shelf Talker: A powerful, thought-provoking story about the choices that ultimately come to define and liberate two women who lived 60 years apart.