Reviews

I wanted to like this so much but it felt really 'meh' to me. It is about a woman who is Instagram famous for having an aesthetic as a Stepford Wives-style 50s housewife, and she spends the majority of her time waiting for her husband, Ted, to come home so she can 'perform' this version of herself for him. Everything seems perfect in her life on the outside but as we get told more and more about Ted and how he mistreats her, the façade of perfection and fakeness she has built around her starts to crumble.

I started to enjoy this more near the end where her sense of reality really started to fall apart, and the structure of 'waiting for Ted' turned really sinister. But I felt like I wanted this to be a lot darker than it was. I wasn't a big fan of the whole Instagram thing and felt that the horror of it was really at odds with the moderness of smart phones and social media. I would have enjoyed if it was more Stepford Wives-y and had more of a horror angle to it like Mrs March or Motherthing does. Waiting For Ted fell really short of these novels for me. The writing felt a little flat for me at times as well and I didn't really feel a sense of character from the wife. I know the whole book is about her identity crisis but even in books like this I thing a strong sense of voice is important and to me the narrator just didn't have this which is why I think I found it underwhelming.

Would definitely read more from the author because I thought the ideas were really interesting and it started to pick up at the end, but this isn't a book I'll think about again much. I would recommend Mrs March or Motherthing instead of this as they are a lot stronger as novels.