Monday, November 2, 2020

delicious but not sweet

Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction/historical fiction
Review: Alice and her husband Nate have just left NYC for life in the suburbs.  Alice is very unsure about leaving the big city, but they think they're ready to start a family, and she's just left her high-powered PR job, and really she can't think of a reason to say no.  So off they go, moving in to Nellie's house.  Of course, Alice and Nellie will never meet, since Nellie's been dead for a year, but Alice will come to feel like she knows Nellie, after discovering a cache of letters and old magazines that Nellie left behind.

What follows is a not-unpredictable, but still satisfying, alternating of chapters.  Nellie and Alice are both keeping secrets from their husbands, but what are they and whose secrets will be found out and whose secrets may prove deadly?  The tension ramps up deliciously through the middle of the book, although Brown is a little heavy-handed with some of the clues.  Put together, the stories form two different, yet not altogether dissimilar looks at the inside of marriage, that though they may be 50+ years apart, may send that message that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

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