The Vision Board is the first book I’m formally reviewing this year and it was a good one to start with.
Description of The Vision Board
Two best friends. Two one-way tickets. And a future that might just surprise them.
Bex and Amy are best friends and total opposites. Bex is cynical, Amy is romantic. Bex is chaotic, Amy is organised. With the prospect of turning 34 just around the corner, neither is where they expected to be at this point in their lives.
Bex is exploring her sexuality and has a string of failed relationships, while Amy is newly single and desperate to fall in love. Armed with a photographic vision board of the future, Bex and Amy put their trust in ‘The Universe’ and fly from London to Bali, then on to Australia in search of adventure, cocktails on the beach and maybe even love.
Almost immediately, Amy finds someone who is the perfect fit for her dream life. While Bex is stuck playing double dates with his best friend, the most pompous man she has ever met, but also one of the hottest. Travelling via white sand beaches, lush rainforests and road trips through idyllic scenery, the images on their vision board begin to transform into reality.
However, people are not always what they seem, and first impressions are not always accurate. Add in a queer, charismatic love interest and a vindictive ex-girlfriend, and the path of true love begins to get a little more complex.
My Review
The Vision Board is a feel-good travel romance about friendship, new beginnings, and learning to trust life when things aren’t going to plan.
Amy and Bex are best friends, but really opposites. When organised and predictable Amy, hearing news of her ex-partner getting married, leaves her teaching job in a huff, Bex suggests that they take a long vacation together. Bex, is an an aspiring actress but loves working in a bar. She’s very spontaneous to the point of being quite unpredictable. Exploring her sexuality and feeling pressure from her family to ‘settle down’ Bex feels the need of something different too.
They decide to head to Bali and Australia but not before attempting to create a vision board for their individual lives, hoping the Universe will bring them closer to their dreams for the future.
While Amy has promised Bex that she will push herself beyond her comfort zone, Bex has promised not to be quick to judge people!
Amy, whose vision board is very specific, meets Ben, apparently the man of her dreams. Meanwhile, Bex is stuck with Ben’s best friend, JP who she finds irritating.
Together with Ben and JP and sometimes separately they have a lot of interesting adventures in Bali and Sydney. I really enjoyed reading about these trips and it made me want to visit the places the author described so well.
I enjoyed Bex’s funny take on life and people and her sparring with JP, while Amy and Ben made a much sweeter, softer couple.
While being a perfectly sweet romance with a happy ending, I love how the author included a meaningful representation of neurodiverse and LGBTQ+ characters and touched on topics of search for identity and dealing with grief.
Overall, The Vision Board was a great read and I will be waiting to read more from this author.
Purchase Link
You can buy The Vision Board here https://amzn.eu/d/7RHRCoc
About the Author
Siobhan Murphy is a writer and photographer based in the UK. She writes (and reads) both light-hearted romantic comedies and contemporary women’s fiction/Bookclub fiction.
Her writing hours are sponsored by Earl Grey tea, chocolate bars several glasses of wine. When she is not writing, reading, or working in her photography day job, her hobbies are eating haribo sweets, talking nonsense and walking into rooms wondering why she is there.
She loves to travel, laugh at the absurdity of life, and enjoy a glass of wine with good friends. She loves a good TV binge session, especially shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Virgin River, Emily in Paris, or This is Us. She can be an emotional wreck who often runs out of tissues and when she was a child, her dad had to constantly reassure her that programmes on the TV weren’t real. The upside of this is that she can legitimately class her habit of binge-watching RomCom films as ‘research.’
Siobhan loves to escape into books and live in other worlds. Like most writers, she has been an avid reader from the second she hurtled into the world (well perhaps a little bit after that). Over the years she’s drifted around the world in search of adventure, hoping to figure out what to do with her life. She is not sure if she has the answer yet but writing certainly comes close. Though she suspects her long-suffering family, and her liver might not agree.
She’s impulsive and easily bored, so she’s turned her hand to many jobs over the years. She’s worked in places as diverse as the High Commission in Nairobi; a market stall selling cheese in the UK and an 80ft racing yacht in Australia. Been a secondary school English teacher and a Barista with no discernible talent for making coffee. She’s done admin work for a number of businesses but discovered that offices aren’t really for her. Her favourite job was as a bookseller for Waterstones, she loved recommending books to customers and applying those 3 for 2 stickers that people find so hard to remove. For the last 19 years she’s been a professional photographer, taking portraits of humans – often the really, really small ones.
Social Media Links
Instagram : @siobhanmurphywriter Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/siobhanmurphywriter
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
