Summary of Taylor Jenkins Reid's the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

4/5

I wasn’t expecting to like this book as much as I ended doing so to be honestly. But as soon as Evelyn began her story I was captivated by her. Somehow her story sucked me in so much I ended up finishing the book in 2 days!

I loved the way Evelyn was so ruthless, so confident and conniving and awful and yet so sympathetic and charming. It was a rollercoaster of how I felt about her but she unashamedly took what she wanted and that I could respect.

Her story started with a bang and the twists and turns of her four husbands were so captivating and I loved them. Some patterns emerged a bit and eventually got a little predictable, the sixth not being nearly as captivating as the others, but honestly that was okay. I think it worked and made sense as she got older and she had less and less shocking revelations. Things kinda of normalized but tue story still kept being very well done.

I personally enjoyed her early life far more, she was wild and unpredictable and so very entertaining. But her older self felt very real where she was confident and started letting go of the early rash choices. It was well done overall.

The part of the books I did not care for were Al with Monique. I think they were not needed and even more so we’re just boring compared to Evelyn. I also was particularly unimpressed with how blatantly it was set up to match Monique’s learnings with the learnings of Evenly’s own life. Just felt a bit too on the nose there. However there were not so many of them that it got too annoying.

The double reveal at the end was interesting. I was able to guess at one but not the other which was a kind of an interesting twist. I did enjoy it though and I think it tied things together especially in bringing Monique into the fold of the narrative better. I still think her POV was unnecessary but oh well.

Overall I really enjoyed the book. It made me really believe that she was a real person who experienced all the things she did. It also wouldn’t shock me that there are people who have possibly lived parts of that life in the same chaos of Hollywood.

This book made me feel things. Mostly happy because I picked it up on the good opinions of strangers, which is often a recipe for disappointment, and I wasn't disappointed. Maybe I was sceptical enough to begin with.

I enjoyed the beginning of the book much more than the end, mostly because at the beginning of the book our main heroine seems interesting, different from what the stereotypes of our society would call strictly "a good person" yet she's very, very likeable. But by the end of the book it seemed that she was saying a message that was a stereotypical "good" message and denied what her life was and somewhat contradicted even what she herself said at the beginning.
The woman who started off by saying she regrets nothing and being very calculating and cool ends up telling me that she had got it all wrong and actually just wanted a family. She doesn't even challenge the perception of what family is supposed to be that much, not explicitly.
Another reason the end fell flat for me might be that I felt oversold on the "you will hate me by the end" revelation being kind of... not as impactful to me as I'd hoped? I guess I hadn't invested much in Monique to feel the shock of her fathers death being slightly different than she originally thought.

Still, it was a book that made me look for excuses to keep listening to it instead of doing anything else. Until near the very end that is. Even though it's just one (and a half if Monique counts) character in whose head I get to be in, Evelyn was still a really cool character in whose head to be.