Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill

TL;DR: I left this at first not liking it but the more it sat on me the more I enjoyed what it made me think about.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: A young woman finds out the truth of her life, where she comes from and the men that control everything.
Characters: A good range of characters here, a lot to hate but a lot of fascinating ones.
Setting: The setting lends well to the story, feeling claustrophobic and trapped within the walls of the compound.
Horror: If you don’t like mushroom, body horror – this is not going to work for you. I really enjoyed it though.

Summary:

Forbidden from leaving her house from girlhood until marriage, Nicole has only her mother’s lessons and what she can see from her bedroom window to draw on in forming her view of the world, and of herself. Taught that the mushrooms which cover the women in her village are repulsive and dangerous, she conforms to a rigid set of rules to protect herself and those around her.

When her wedding day arrives, Nicole moves from one prison to another—an empty mansion on the very outskirts of town belonging to the husband she’s been promised to since birth. As she haunts the edges of Silas’s unknowable life and decaying home, maintaining control over her own transforming body becomes increasingly impossible. And when another wife with rebellious tendencies pays Nicole an unexpected visit, something within her cracks open. Their furtive explorations yield confusing answers, unearthing the long-buried secrets of the generations of resentful brides that came before. Unmoored, angry, and at last awakened, Nicole must reckon with who she really is, and perhaps, give in to what she truly wants.

Raw, visceral, and relentless, Wife Shaped Bodies is an exploration of gender, power, and community through the lens of mycological body horror and an ode to the unsettling beauty of the natural world.

Thoughts:

Sometimes when you finish a book you know, it’s immediately a winner. Sometimes when you finish a book you don’t know, you think ‘Hmm… I didn’t like that’. But sitting on it, it grows on you. This is definitely the latter for me. I finished Wife Shaped Bodies and just grumbled about how I didn’t enjoy it, I even complained to my husband. Now, after some time has passed I find myself thinking more about it and enjoying parts of this far more.

Wife Shaped Bodies is a book about female rage, about being trapped in the mechanisms of man. The opening of the book finds Nicole being prepared for her marriage to a man far older than her. Her mother trims her mushroom growths as her new life is beginning. But as her new life begins, another ends, her mother dying the next morning. She has to face that grief, her new marriage, and the truth about the commune in which they live and it’s weird and wild.

Female rage and mushrooms is the best I can give you this as far as anymore information. This one really captures what women fear, in being trapped in cycles of more than one kind, of no bodily autonomy, and knowing anyone that comes after you is trapped as well. How does that break, and does she break in the process. I think I would recommend it if you like those weird, female rage books but check all the triggers.