What do you think?
Sagebrush Baby
Violet’s real life sucks.
While her golden-boy brother collects milestones like trophies—We bought a house! We got married! We’re expecting!—Violet is stuck.
Stuck working at Dollar General.
Stuck in a single-wide trailer with her vodka-soaked mother.
And stuck with a boyfriend who refuses to have children…with her.
To escape, Violet becomes someone else. Online, she’s DreamsWilted1: a tragic yet noble mother of two autistic children, dishing out grim warnings about the horrors of marriage and motherhood to a small internet audience.
It’s all a lie, of course. But for once, Violet is seen.
So when a new man moves into her dead-end town, she sees an opportunity to bring her wilted dreams to life. She becomes pregnant. And this time, she goes viral. Suddenly, she’s no longer faking a story, she’s living it.
But when the past catches up—and one of her followers gets too close to the truth—Violet is forced to do the unthinkable to keep her story alive.
While her golden-boy brother collects milestones like trophies—We bought a house! We got married! We’re expecting!—Violet is stuck.
Stuck working at Dollar General.
Stuck in a single-wide trailer with her vodka-soaked mother.
And stuck with a boyfriend who refuses to have children…with her.
To escape, Violet becomes someone else. Online, she’s DreamsWilted1: a tragic yet noble mother of two autistic children, dishing out grim warnings about the horrors of marriage and motherhood to a small internet audience.
It’s all a lie, of course. But for once, Violet is seen.
So when a new man moves into her dead-end town, she sees an opportunity to bring her wilted dreams to life. She becomes pregnant. And this time, she goes viral. Suddenly, she’s no longer faking a story, she’s living it.
But when the past catches up—and one of her followers gets too close to the truth—Violet is forced to do the unthinkable to keep her story alive.
313 pages, Paperback
Published July 29, 2025
About the author
Leah Campbell
3 books17 followersLeah Campbell is an author specializing in romance and general fiction. During the day, she works as a Product Director at a tech company. In her free time, she enjoys writing, whether works of fiction or blogs about technology and product management. She also considers herself an avid fiber artist and obsessive lover of all things romance and horror. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and cat.
She is the author of two romance novels, My Boyfriend Satan and Another Mourning Support Group.
She is the author of two romance novels, My Boyfriend Satan and Another Mourning Support Group.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
August 4, 2026
Is it unethical to have an emotional affair on your fake husband?
I saw someone describe this as "This just got worse and worse (complimentary)." And I RAN to the Kindle Store.
There are books about motherhood. There are books about the performance of motherhood.
And then there's this book, which asks,"Okay... but what if what you actually wanted wasn't a baby? What if what you wanted was the identity of being someone who has one?"
Violet spends the whole book trying to fill a hole that doesn't have a bottom.
Every decision's supposed to fix the last one. Naturally, none of them do. She just keeps digging until she's basically mining for emotional oil.
Everyone in this book is awful. Every. Single. One.
It's basically an endless conga line of emotionally constipated people enabling one another and doing increasingly terrible things.
But that's exactly what makes it work.
The real villain isn't Violet. Or social media. Or motherhood. Or the patriarchy.
It's hunger. The kind of hunger that can never actually be fed.
Validation. Attention. Identity. Love. Recognition. The desperate need for somebody to look at you and decide you're worth something.
That's the big bad.
Violet isn't a moustache twirling villain. She's just one tiny rationalisation away from the next one. Everything about her life becomes, "Just one more..."
Just one more lie. Just one more compromise. Just one more thing she'll definitely (absolutely not) deal with later.
So you look back and realise there was never one catastrophic decision, but hundreds of tiny ones.
The social media commentary's also fantastic because it never collapses into phones bad discourse.
It's about performance and about curating a version of yourself that's just convincing enough that eventually you start believing it too.
And can we also give the Nevada desert a Best Supporting Actor award? Because that setting is doing some heavy lifting. Everything feels dry and dusty. It's the perfect backdrop for watching people slowly unravel under the weight of their own expectations.
Read
May 20, 2025This one came from deep in my heart, molded from my fears and toxic thoughts and insecurities. I loved writing it and I sure hope you love reading it. This one is for my desert queens and kings in Reno, Carson Valley, and, of course, little ol' Washoe Valley.
August 6, 2026
V. Disturbing but I couldn’t put it down.
July 31, 2026
4 stars
It just kept getting worse and worse the longer it went on, oh my God (compliment)
It just kept getting worse and worse the longer it went on, oh my God (compliment)
September 19, 2025
rough stuff
June 11, 2026
What in the actual F did I just read?! I have read some unhinged characters in my day, but Violet may take the damn cake, or in her case, sage.
Set in a trailer park in the middle of Nevada desert (which is unique in and of itself) we get to meet quite a range of bizarre, self-centered and narcissistic characters. This novel has every trigger warning known to man. So please look them up!
Violet made me angry and disgusted. We see a very dark look at social media, influencing, the desire for attention AND parenting. Campbell does not shy away from the ugly and it is pretty brutal. I don’t know why I haven’t seen this around more since we seem to be in an era of female rage and delusion.
Set in a trailer park in the middle of Nevada desert (which is unique in and of itself) we get to meet quite a range of bizarre, self-centered and narcissistic characters. This novel has every trigger warning known to man. So please look them up!
Violet made me angry and disgusted. We see a very dark look at social media, influencing, the desire for attention AND parenting. Campbell does not shy away from the ugly and it is pretty brutal. I don’t know why I haven’t seen this around more since we seem to be in an era of female rage and delusion.
September 18, 2025
Sagebrush Baby is a dark, gripping look at the twisted side of parenthood, and how social media messes with our sense of self. The main character is a narcissistic psychopath, and watching her unravel is both disturbing and hard to put down. The book does an amazing job of showing how disconnected people can get from each other (and themselves) in today’s world. It’s intense, thought-provoking, and stays with you long after finishing. Definitely worth reading if you’re into stories that explore the messier sides of human nature!
March 13, 2026
what. the fuck.
May 20, 2026
I don’t know how to rate this one. I’m so angry with this book. Not at the writing, but the story. The characters. The outcome. Every character was hateable. Fuck Violet. Fuck Mother. But most of all, fuck Violet. Psychotic b****. This triggered me and I don’t even want children. I’m so disgusted by this book. Ugh.
May 7, 2026
It's sagebrush, baby.
Goddamn. I feel like I need to see a therapist after spending so much time in Violet's brain via this book.
Incredible work by the author! Can't wait to read anything and everything she writes!
Goddamn. I feel like I need to see a therapist after spending so much time in Violet's brain via this book.
Incredible work by the author! Can't wait to read anything and everything she writes!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2026
Ummmm what? No trigger warnings? Intense stuff
April 4, 2026
Please don’t read this if you have a child, especially a baby. This was really triggering and made me stick to my stomach. Really well written, just so so dark.
June 19, 2026
I’ll echo other reviews… what. the. fuck.
This was super dark, even for me.
Don’t believe what you see on social media.
This was super dark, even for me.
Don’t believe what you see on social media.
June 6, 2026
what a book to get me out of my reading slump!! i will always love delusional women and unfortunately violet is now top of the list. this made me miss reno in the most diabolical way. so many lenses to read through between social media brain rot, performative motherhood, peaking in high school, food deserts in low incomes (dollar general groceries whew), you name it.
fucked up, well written, delusional, bad bitch, 10/10 for all of it
fucked up, well written, delusional, bad bitch, 10/10 for all of it
September 22, 2025
Sagebrush Baby is a must read. There a twists and turns you don’t see coming with complex characters and an unhinged plot. I highly recommend this book- Leah’s way of story telling is one that draws you in and keeps your attention. Read Sagebrush Baby!!!
June 27, 2026
Three stars feels almost too generous and yet strangely appropriate for Sagebrush Baby — a novel that is, without question, technically accomplished, and yet leaves you feeling as though you've wandered into someone's fever dream without a map or any particular reason to care about anyone trapped inside it.
Leah Campbell writes with spare, assured confidence. Her prose carries a deliberate grit befitting a story set against the bleached, indifferent landscape of the Nevada desert. There is real craft here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But craft in service of what, exactly? That is where this novel begins to unravel.
Violet is, by design, a profoundly disturbed protagonist. She constructs an entire fabricated identity online — complete with fictional children she portrays as autistic — as a form of emotional currency, a means of being seen in a life that affords her almost none. This is where Campbell's premise is at its most genuinely unsettling, and for a stretch, there is something compulsively readable about watching Violet inhabit her own elaborate lie. But Campbell populates her novel with a cast so uniformly awful — so thoroughly stripped of even a faint redeeming quality — that the reading experience becomes less a study in human darkness and more an endurance test. Unlikeable characters are not themselves the problem. Literature is full of them, and we are better for it. The problem arises when every character exists on the same flat plane of awfulness, where no one's choices carry moral weight because no one has any moral ground to stand on. When everyone is equally terrible, no one is particularly interesting.
Vinnie's absence of grief following River's death is perhaps the novel's most jarring miscalculation. Whether intended as a commentary on emotional vacancy or simply a failure of characterization, it reads as hollow. It was a moment that should crack the narrative open with consequence and instead falls entirely silent. We knew he was an asshole but we still should have seen SOME kind of reaction from the deadbeat dad himself.
And then there is the ending. Violet consuming sagebrush appears to be Campbell reaching for something feral and symbolic — a woman dissolving back into the desert landscape that formed her. What it communicates instead is confusion bordering on alienation. If the image is meant to signal complete psychological disintegration, it requires far more narrative scaffolding than the novel bothers to construct. More troubling still is the question the book never satisfyingly answers: why did Violet genuinely want a child? Not in performance, not for the algorithm — but at her core. The novel gestures toward the answer without ever committing to one, which is perhaps its most damning quality.
What rescues Sagebrush Baby from a lower rating is the very thing that makes it so difficult to simply dismiss — Campbell can write. The sentences hold. The atmosphere is viscerally rendered. The premise, however repellent in execution, is genuinely original. But originality without emotional coherence is ultimately just noise, and for all its shock and dark audacity, this novel produces a considerable amount of it.
Leah Campbell writes with spare, assured confidence. Her prose carries a deliberate grit befitting a story set against the bleached, indifferent landscape of the Nevada desert. There is real craft here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But craft in service of what, exactly? That is where this novel begins to unravel.
Violet is, by design, a profoundly disturbed protagonist. She constructs an entire fabricated identity online — complete with fictional children she portrays as autistic — as a form of emotional currency, a means of being seen in a life that affords her almost none. This is where Campbell's premise is at its most genuinely unsettling, and for a stretch, there is something compulsively readable about watching Violet inhabit her own elaborate lie. But Campbell populates her novel with a cast so uniformly awful — so thoroughly stripped of even a faint redeeming quality — that the reading experience becomes less a study in human darkness and more an endurance test. Unlikeable characters are not themselves the problem. Literature is full of them, and we are better for it. The problem arises when every character exists on the same flat plane of awfulness, where no one's choices carry moral weight because no one has any moral ground to stand on. When everyone is equally terrible, no one is particularly interesting.
Vinnie's absence of grief following River's death is perhaps the novel's most jarring miscalculation. Whether intended as a commentary on emotional vacancy or simply a failure of characterization, it reads as hollow. It was a moment that should crack the narrative open with consequence and instead falls entirely silent. We knew he was an asshole but we still should have seen SOME kind of reaction from the deadbeat dad himself.
And then there is the ending. Violet consuming sagebrush appears to be Campbell reaching for something feral and symbolic — a woman dissolving back into the desert landscape that formed her. What it communicates instead is confusion bordering on alienation. If the image is meant to signal complete psychological disintegration, it requires far more narrative scaffolding than the novel bothers to construct. More troubling still is the question the book never satisfyingly answers: why did Violet genuinely want a child? Not in performance, not for the algorithm — but at her core. The novel gestures toward the answer without ever committing to one, which is perhaps its most damning quality.
What rescues Sagebrush Baby from a lower rating is the very thing that makes it so difficult to simply dismiss — Campbell can write. The sentences hold. The atmosphere is viscerally rendered. The premise, however repellent in execution, is genuinely original. But originality without emotional coherence is ultimately just noise, and for all its shock and dark audacity, this novel produces a considerable amount of it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 21, 2026
I umm… I don’t know what I just read. The main character in this book was horrific. And it had me so twisted up inside because I initially felt bad for her and just couldn’t grapple with it all.
This has to be one of the most unhinged female main characters that I’ve ever read. It’s set in a trailer park in a tiny town in the desert, and there are really just no options in life for Violet or anyone. Every single character is despicable in their own way, but I really struggled hard because part of it was a product of generational circumstances and trauma, but at some point that stops being an excuse for Violet’s behavior.
Just be sure to check the trigger warnings because this one is bad.
This has to be one of the most unhinged female main characters that I’ve ever read. It’s set in a trailer park in a tiny town in the desert, and there are really just no options in life for Violet or anyone. Every single character is despicable in their own way, but I really struggled hard because part of it was a product of generational circumstances and trauma, but at some point that stops being an excuse for Violet’s behavior.
Just be sure to check the trigger warnings because this one is bad.
March 27, 2026
A total 'what the fuck did I just read'.
Every character is behaving badly. Doing their best in terrible ways. Violet is a stressful character to follow, and her spiral was painful to endure. These are all compliments. I enjoy unhinged characters, and still, I don't know that I'll ever be able to coherently describe what this book did to me.
Be mindful of your trigger warnings!
Every character is behaving badly. Doing their best in terrible ways. Violet is a stressful character to follow, and her spiral was painful to endure. These are all compliments. I enjoy unhinged characters, and still, I don't know that I'll ever be able to coherently describe what this book did to me.
Be mindful of your trigger warnings!
October 3, 2026
Honestly just a book about rampant mental illness yet again. Nobody was redeemable except Pat. Mother, Vinnie, Emmet, & pretty much everyone else sucked. Along with Violet. This book is a good example of the dangers of social media and what people do for likes and attention. Going viral is always the goal.
Violet is an awful person. Manipulative and selfish, she’s ready to turn a situation around to benefit herself. In some parts I felt bad for her, but it was mostly just disgust at her behavior. Also, did everyone in that town live at that trailer park? Did nobody else have anywhere else to go? Why is there one Dollar Tree? Don’t tell me they don’t have 5 around the corner. Also the scene where Tawny is giving birth made me laugh cause why was everyone there?! Literally everyone Violet knew was just crammed into this room and I would have died. Honestly she handled shit better than I would have.
I read the reviews and was anticipating more from the ending. Yes it’s sad and fucked, but I already saw this behavior coming from Violet so it didn’t really shock me. It seems right on brand. I didn’t think it was as shocking as it was made to seem. This is an interesting character study about a girl who is willing to risk it all in order to stay relevant. I also thought it was funny to see a drama unfold in a town the size of a shoebox where everyone is literally pressed together. It’s wild.
Violet is an awful person. Manipulative and selfish, she’s ready to turn a situation around to benefit herself. In some parts I felt bad for her, but it was mostly just disgust at her behavior. Also, did everyone in that town live at that trailer park? Did nobody else have anywhere else to go? Why is there one Dollar Tree? Don’t tell me they don’t have 5 around the corner. Also the scene where Tawny is giving birth made me laugh cause why was everyone there?! Literally everyone Violet knew was just crammed into this room and I would have died. Honestly she handled shit better than I would have.
I read the reviews and was anticipating more from the ending. Yes it’s sad and fucked, but I already saw this behavior coming from Violet so it didn’t really shock me. It seems right on brand. I didn’t think it was as shocking as it was made to seem. This is an interesting character study about a girl who is willing to risk it all in order to stay relevant. I also thought it was funny to see a drama unfold in a town the size of a shoebox where everyone is literally pressed together. It’s wild.
August 31, 2026
3.5 ⭐️
Trashy, uncomfy, graphic, but also refreshing in the most messed up way. 🫠
While I appreciated finally reading about a character who isn’t a rich, aspiring/failing artist/writer (seriously, can we take a break?), the level of derangement and how that manipulation manifested sickened me.
I think a lot of ppl going into this (myself included), will believe this is “good for her” feels, but it’s straight up “fuck you, girl”. 🖕🏼
Trashy, uncomfy, graphic, but also refreshing in the most messed up way. 🫠
While I appreciated finally reading about a character who isn’t a rich, aspiring/failing artist/writer (seriously, can we take a break?), the level of derangement and how that manipulation manifested sickened me.
I think a lot of ppl going into this (myself included), will believe this is “good for her” feels, but it’s straight up “fuck you, girl”. 🖕🏼
September 28, 2026
DNF at 80%
The beginning and middle were slow and very interesting HOWEVER around 60% when violet had the baby is when things got DARK AND DISTURBING.
I know this is satire but reading about child abuse for the sake of views is not something I can get down with. So dnf and I don’t recommend this book to a mother or really anyone who loves kiddos.
The beginning and middle were slow and very interesting HOWEVER around 60% when violet had the baby is when things got DARK AND DISTURBING.
I know this is satire but reading about child abuse for the sake of views is not something I can get down with. So dnf and I don’t recommend this book to a mother or really anyone who loves kiddos.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 12, 2026
I’ve said it before but I am always fascinated by a narrator who’s a terrible person and Violet (the main character) definitely slots in the top 5. Not only is the narrator terrible but so is literally every peripheral character surrounding her. I was not expecting this book to go the way it did.
Read
September 27, 2026tbh don’t even know how to rate this. was a quick read that lowkey made the book feel like a novella not a whole novel. the book is uncomfy and messy and all the characters suck but the book wasnt like a bad read
March 18, 2026
I loved this book but also am incredibly angry at this book lol. like.. WHY? Violet needs serious therapy and this truly makes me glad I experience zero desire to have a baby.
Did Not Finish
April 10, 2026I really enjoyed what I read of this book (just under 50%). I just had some life things come up and fell off before finishing it. I hope to go back to it at some point.
April 10, 2026
this was so insane i don't even have the words just check trigger warnings for sure
July 22, 2026
This was a hard one for me. Pay attention to trigger warnings especially if you are sensitive to anything with kids.
August 4, 2026
Haven't even read it and I know it's 10x better than Yesteryear.
August 6, 2026
Wowza was this fucked up
August 28, 2026
i can’t really say i enjoyed this. the first half of the book was such a slow burn and when it eventually got interesting, it was too gruesome for me.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews