A review by emilyusuallyreading
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

4.0

This book is a fast, suspenseful read. I finished it in a sitting and found myself laughing at certain moments and feeling eerily creeped out in others. While this is a thriller, it is not a horror story. Tension builds from the first page to the last, creating a question that sums up the entire story: What's with the women in Stepford?

So many moments in The Stepford Wives are strikingly memorable. The mild-mannered husbands with dark plans that they concoct up on the hill at the Men's Club. Joanna holding her own in conversation with her husband's friends, only to find herself sketched into an unrealistic ideal of herself and treated like a waitress. Bobbie's paranoia of being ultimately turned into one of them. The ending is ominous.

There are certainly questions about how a society like The Stepford Wives could exist for an extended period of time. Do the fathers plan to surgically alter/turn into robots their daughters as they grow into adulthood? Will the young girls be brainwashed into believing their only goal in life is to clean and please men, or will they rebel and become the wildest teenage girls in the state? Will the fathers want their own daughters to be over-sexualized, brainless caricatures of themselves?

The Stepford Wives makes you stop and think.