The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, Peter Straub Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Stepford Wives
Book Review: Suspenseful and engaging
Summary: 5 Stars
This book tells the story of a family that moves out of the city and relocates to the picture-perfect town of Stepford. Joanna, the main character, makes a few "normal" friends in her new neighborhood, but she soon realizes that most of the women in town seem to exist for the sole purpose of pleasing their husbands, lacking any personal ambitions of their own. She begins to suspect that all the men in town are involved in an evil conspiracy, and that even her own husband is out to get her.
The story is suspenseful and entertaining. My only two complaints are that it's too short (I finished the book in just under two hours) and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. We know what happens to Joanna at the end of the story, but I would have liked a little more information about how the men's club was able to orchestrate everything. The flip side of that, though, is that a lot is left up to your own imagination, which makes it even more terrifying.
Book Review: The Stepford Influence
Summary: 4 Stars
With The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin perhaps defines one particular style of horror or suspense fiction. Taking a normal situation and turning it upside down, eerily so, Levin blazed a trail for authors like Stephen King or Bentley Little. Levin presents readers with the town of Stepford, a remote suburb away from the grind of big-town living. Idyllic, inviting and almost utopian, Levin begins to introduce oddities, imperfections that lead both the protagonist and the reader to conclude that certain things aren't what they seem. And of course, they're not.After reading The Stepford Wives, I was immediately surprised at how much influence the novel obviously had on some more contemporary horror and suspense authors - Andrew Neiderman's Amnesia and Neighborhood Watch as well as Bentley Little's The Association owe a lot Levin's Stepford.
Book Review: The ending is unbelievable!
Summary: 3 Stars
We read the ?Stepford wives" in English class. I really liked it!Joanna, a very nice and brave woman who tries to fight against the Men's Association from Stepford, and even tries to fight against her own husband - just to live her life and to keep her own identity.
I found the book good. I read it twice. But the end of the book was unbelievable, because I thought the book had a happy ending, but it did not turn out that way!!
The book was really easy to understand.
Book Review: The future housewives
Summary: 3 Stars
The book is very particular, it is a suspense story. It is an interesting idea to write about the life of a family, of a wife, who lived in a city and then went to a small village. All is new in Stepford, the work, the school, the surroundings, but above all the wives in the town. The crucial difference is the housework, the women in Stepford do nothing but clean the house, look after the children and cook for their husband.Sometimes it is a bit difficult to understand the story as there are unknown words in some parts. The end is strange there is not a real end, the story is somehow chopped off.
Book Review: Uneasy and lots of question marks
Summary: 2 Stars
I felt uneasy when I read this book. It's not that kind of thriller I expected. I don't know why the story irritated me. Is it because I am a female or I am not an american so that I cannot appreciate the sarcasm? If it's a thriller, I believe, it's only for women. Maybe it points out the deepest fear for women. Also the story leaves me many question marks. If it's not the structural problem of the story, it must be my lack of knowledge for western style literature or american culture. However, I agree with the excellence of how the author schedules the story. He did tell a four-month-long story, not just picked some time points out, and, in the meanwhile, still kept reader interested in the story.