You fall for my tricks, I'll fall for yours

Ok finished this and I'm not sure where to begin. my sister and I were both reading this together. She hated the main character, I felt sorry for her.

for some reason this book punishes her over and over and over but tries to convince you its all her choices, her choices somehow exist in a vacuum.

Her biggest sin according her traditional values mom is that she's not kind and for this reason she ends up humiliated over and over and raped.

Natalie's mom:

ignores her post partum depression, and suggests she take a jog after giving birth! and reveals at the end of the book that she told a life altering lie to her (her dad never left them, her mom was the cheater after all and ordered the dad to leave thus preventing him from being in her life) but this barely gets a nod at all and later Nat's abused kids are like "thank god for grandma who was so supportive" um WTF?

first of all, the mom seemed just as narcissistic as Natalie, imagine revealing such a bombshell as "oh your dad was a good guy actually but he wasn't in your life because I lied and cheated" um that alone is enough to fuck you up and need YEARS of therapy.

Caleb:

was he inspired by Rusty Yates? Did he go to jail? Was he really smart and conning Nat the whole time like Shannon claimed? His brothers avoided him but they don't really say why other than he was not masculine, not ambitious and the whole thing about him just wanting to play with the babies and be a kindergarten teacher was under explored. A man wanting to be a kindergarten teacher or be nurturing to kids is not bad in and of itself but he definitely only wanted the easy part of those jobs and not any "real work" which isn't a masculine failure but a general failure. He could only get hard when he was dominating his wife? or cheating on her? his porn choices were about loving couples having happy sex when he was young but later on we see him resigned to only having non-consensual sex with his mentally broken wife. He wasn't mentally ill, but his wife gets all the blame for the kids abuse (hello Rusty Yates)

He's useless and irredeemable, though they could have better explored how patriarchy harmed men as well but he had 0 work ethic

Shannon: Here is where I thought that Caro ripped off Gone Girl's Andie, except in this context Shannon made no sense. She's there to expose Nat which is understandable (but lol Natalie and Caleb didn't make employees sign NDAs?) yet she defends and sleeps with Caleb even though she doesn't respect him. (the whole I would never have kids with that man and her being surprised he thought she him to run away with her) Her methods made her seem like she placed ALL the blame on Natalie and why did she pull that Gone Girl Andie trick of presenting herself as a completely different persona in her media interview? the sexual assault and lesbian angle against nat again supports the extra personal revenge fantasy Shannon executed was about Natalie and not against the "Maze" or "patriarchy", thats if her story about her barnard friends was even true. I kinda get why Clementine saw her as her savior and kept in touch with her but Shannon was a similarly confused and unreliable person to me. She could have called CPS to save the kids and prevented Natalie from having more of them with Caleb by using her evidence to give to the authorities rather than just use it for a media circus that didn't even succeed in preventing Natalie and Caleb from really creating a situation where kids suffered more

The Sons in the cabin: don't even remember their names, Stetson and Samuel or whatever, they were just as useless as daddy and helping him keep up the charade by bringing them the store bought groceries and making it look like produce Caleb grew himself. How did they not end up in jail.

Mary: broke my heart. When she found out her "neighbors" were her brothers

Overall thoughts on the book:

the christian stuff was strange and not really christian, her beliefs seemed random and incoherent and not tied to any one religious belief. Parts of the book felt very "written by AI" such was when there was a sentence like "I could hear the clacking of my mom's sewing needles as she knit" um sewing needles don't clack aren't used for knitting.

also Mary going to the woods looking for saffron? in winter? in idaho? these are quality errors. an editor should have caught these.

my blorbos in their cages.