Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
This is my first Catherine Ryan Howard book, and based on this book, I don’t think it will be my last. I loved the side plot of the histories of houses and can they taint future owners. But, I think the main plot following three women: Ellie, Erin, and Hannah through different times was what held the book together. You quickly find out what is tying these women together, or who is, but I did like how things were revealed and we find out what happened to everyone and how. The only thing that stuck in my craw was the ending honestly. I didn’t find it believable, and think that everything should have come out.
Buyer Beware follows Ellie who has a home at 1 Delaney Row in Dublin, Ireland. Ellie just wants to start her life over again and doesn’t want any of her new neighbors to pay too much attention to her. But when it’s obvious someone is trying to get inside Ellie’s home to scare her off, or worse, do her harm, she starts investigating the house’s history. Along with that, we are provided two other POV’s. A woman named Erin and another woman named Hannah. Erin we follow as she prepares for exams and meets “the one.” And Hannah who is a successful business woman who is single and happy, until she meets someone who has her rethinking being single. The book moves back and forth between these women, timelines, until things merge around the halfway point and then we get a clearer sense of what is going on.
I did find Ellie a little off as the book starts. You don’t know what she’s hiding from or why, but you know it’s not good. It takes until the halfway point almost for things to come together that you figure out who Ellie is, but what you don’t know until almost the end of the book, is what pushed her off her path.
I felt the most though throughout the book, for the character of Erin. Not trying to put out too much to spoil readers, but every choice she made I kept going, well you are going to regret that. She’s definitely telling her story with regret and, if onlys, but you wonder if she would have chose differently even if she had known how things were going to end up.
I enjoyed the character of Hannah until we get some fly in the ointment, and then you see a different side of her. And then when things go the way they do, you see another side. She’s another one that you wish had chosen differently. I think though that is what is great about Howard, you see all of these women and the things that binds them together outside of [redacted] was wishes that they had chosen a different path than the one they got on.
The side-plot about the house comes and goes throughout the book, but it definitely doesn’t become fully revealed until the end. And honestly, I wish that it had been left alone. I think Howard trying to wrap that up took things away from the book that it didn’t need honestly.
The flow of the book works I thought. You go back and forth between all three women and then we have a merge point and I thought everything was really well done.
The only thing that knocked this down a star for me as I said above was the ending. It was so not realistic and I called BS on the whole thing. And, I think I was supposed to get some female solidarity thing going, but I really wanted to say to at least the three women we followed throughout this book, there seemed to be no owning of what they did at all. Instead everything was deflected to another person. So you have to wonder did anyone learn anything? I didn’t think so.
I read this for CBR18Bingo:
- 26 – a book published or set during 2026, 1926, and so on; has a sentence you really like on page 26, or 126, or 260; related to Teddy Roosevelt (the 26th president of the United States). This book will be published July 28, 2026.
