A review by tori_renee_reads
A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings

challenging emotional hopeful tense medium-paced

5.0

It’s hard to know where to begin. As someone who grew up in religious fanaticism, I related to so many feelings Tia Levings expresses in her book A Well-Trained Wife. I read this a few months ago and meant to write a review for release day, but found it difficult to process my own feelings. Religious trama is so hard to see the other side of, and Levings explored it so rawly and yet with great nuance. 

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Her story is chilling and so worth reading. If you enjoyed Educated or I’m Glad My Mom Died, you would definitely connect here as well. I want to include some quotes that stood out to me. I’ve also included them in the pictures of you want to swipe and read them there. 

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“Boys got what they wanted. Girls gave it up for God.”

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“Supposedly, God loved us all the same but how did that work? We weren’t all the same. Some were rich, some poor, some good, some ugly. If church was a glimpse of heaven, then God played favorites.”

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“I knew I was still too close to going to hell with decapitated liars and baby killers because I hadn’t discovered the secret rules that no one said out loud. So, Sundays became a chance to study and be observant.”

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“But she doesn’t have a name. She’s no one outside of what she does.”

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“At church, friends are forever ‘if.’”

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“…burst a blistered bubble I realized I’d been protecting for years: the idea that the world was inherently dangerous.”

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“I lived in a state of high-alert that bad things would happen to me, while simultaneously pushing away the memory of the bad things that had already happened.”

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“Say no. Take time out. Let them deal with their feelings of disappointment without trying to assuage their pain by compounding my own.”