For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret -- a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.

It is interesting to watch the world unfold from the point of view of the main character, Joanna Eberhart, and to see it as a mirror image of our society. After a few chapters you start to wonder if you are seeing the town as it is or as Joanna sees it. Is her reality cracking or is she really in danger? Is this science gone crazy? Is this culture sucking in the new comers and changing them? Or is this the beautiful American dream, the final goal of having a ideal family, the stable and stale happiness that all people wish for?

At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, "The Stepford Wives" is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.

It's hard to tell if this is a stab at the feminist movement or simply a male fantasy, but it's a fun read and will keep you turning the pages. This is a thought provoking, tautly written novella. A gem of suspense, it was first published in the early 1970s and went on to become a popular movie of the same name, starring Katherine Ross and later on of course starring Nicole Kidman.

Book Details:

Title The Stepford Wives
Author Ira Levin and Peter Straub
Reviewed By Purplycookie ( )

The Stepford Wives might have been the story of real women in Jordan, Syria or Yemen. Women utterly controlled by their husbands but not looking it necessarily as they no longer (have to) wear hijab. But its the story instead of American women whose husbands would like to control them in the same way without (like the Arab Muslim men) having any controls on themselves and not being able to do so in the normal way resort to extremism. So the women are dehumanised in life and in the book.Although this is a good, light read from one point of view, what it says about the nature of the majority of men is not light at all. In Arab society there are men, a few, who do not like the strictures their women have to live under, but most do not object at all and some seek to deepen and spread them even into our own societies. Ira Levin's book is as much a parable as it is entertainment. ( )

Well, it has been many years since I first saw the movie. This book has been lying around my library, and I thought I'd pick it up and read it on a slow day.

Two interesting things strike me. First, the book is very dated. The very notion of the interaction between the lead couple seems to be time-worn. Perhaps my interpretation is jaded a bit by what I view to be our current gender environment.

Second, as great as the story is, it has lost its power to shock. In this era of doom and gloom, it seems as if the ending is anti-climatic.

Maybe I just saw the original movie too long ago to really appreciate the story. ( )

The women of Stepford, the setting of this 1972 novel by Ira Levin, are seemingly perfect: large-breasted housewives with immaculate homes and a cheerful attitudes. When newcomer Joanna and her friend Bobbie, another newcomer, try to encourage the women of Stepford to step outside their domestic world, they begin to suspect that there’s some sinister reason for the women’s submissiveness. And indeed there is, but if you don’t know the secret, you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is.

The best horror stories tap into our real fears, and it would be easy to say that The Stepford Wives doesn’t really horrify us today because women are more liberated. But are we? True, more of us work outside the home, but how often do we allow society define who we are supposed to be, instead of deciding for ourselves? The women of Stepford are forced into becoming who they are, but I think a lot of women today give in to societal pressure willingly, choosing to stay slim, stylish, and submissive, not because that’s their nature or inclination (which if it is, fine), but because they’re told that’s who they’re supposed to be.

As long as feminist is a dirty word and women allow their identities to be defined by others, The Stepford Wives is pertinent—and scary. And I hope someday it won’t be.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

It was pretty short and to the point. The end was pretty hard to swallow, even after so many years have passed since it was written. I had to laugh when the pieces started to fit together, because there's just no way.

I did like the slow progression of things, though, and I liked how the alliances held between the three women at the beginning started dropping off one by one. The constant cleaning endeavors of the other housewives was pretty funny, too, and I wasn't entirely sure if it was supposed to be.

I read it in a couple hours, and I liked it all right, but it's not something that I'd give to all my friends, nor will it stay with me for very long. It is an odd little story, though. ( )