Book Review: Be Careful What You Wish For by Vivien Brown

 

Be Careful What You Wish For
by
Vivien Brown 
Title: Be Careful What You Wish For by Vivien Brown
Rating: 4 stars (🌟🌟🌟🌟)
Publisher:

This was a page-turner and it pulled me right in. Prue, a twenty-four-year-old from a small village swaps homes with Madi, a sixty-two-year-old from London. They both have good reason to get away from home for a month and when the story opens the "Why?" is part of the mystery to be unravelled. 


The story is told primarily in the POVs of the two women but there is another POV that pops up along the way: that of a bitter stalker that we know from their first writing is going to do some physical damage or kill someone. The big mystery propelling this story is who is the bitter stalker with the plot? I so enjoyed trying to decipher that part of the story.


There's a bit of a tonal shift to the part of the story where we get to know Prue and Madi in the new homes and surroundings they've swapped. It was nice to see how both women had similarities and differences and got to know one another a bit through others. This part of the story felt more like your usual Women's Fiction (I hate that classification but I don't have any other signifier to convey this point) fare with heartwarming themes as both women healed, came out of themselves more and became part of their new communities. I admit that this wasn't the big pull for me as a reader but it did lend a more hopeful tone and certainly did make me hope that neither woman was done in by the book's end.

No spoilers but this did end very well. I had my suspicions about the bitter stalker's identity as more characters were introduced but there was always one important thing that the reader doesn't have the answer or any clue to before the denouement. That was a bit frustrating but that's just a personal preference for how I like my mystery reads to proceed. The cover hints at a darker tale than I felt this resolved into but I do love the cover. It's what caught my eye and part of why I requested the ARC.

Recommended.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the Advance Reader's Copy of this book.


Summary: Two strangers.
Two very different lives.

A chance to escape…or is it?
Her life isn’t as perfect as you think…

Former actress Madi needs to escape from her lonely London life. She’s started to forget things and has the strongest sense she is being watched…

Prue feels suffocated by her claustrophobic village life, especially when she is humiliated in the most public way. Now Prue is desperate for anonymity –whatever the cost.






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