★★★★★ - Five Stars
I bought this because everybody seemed to be talking about it.
Bookshops had it piled on tables. It kept appearing online. People were saying it had broken their hearts. Other people were saying it was completely overhyped.
Obviously, I had to find out which camp I belonged to.
Well.
Consider my heart thoroughly broken.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo introduces us to Evelyn Hugo, an ageing Hollywood legend who has spent decades guarding the truth about her life. Now she has decided to tell everything, and for reasons nobody understands, she wants virtually unknown journalist Monique Grant to write her story.
And when Evelyn says everything, she really does mean everything.
Her rise from an ordinary girl to one of Hollywood's biggest stars is told through the story of her seven marriages. Some were about love. Some were useful. Some were mistakes. And some are considerably more complicated than they first appear.
I loved Evelyn.
I also disliked Evelyn.
Occasionally I wanted to shake Evelyn.
That's probably why she worked so well for me.
Taylor Jenkins Reid hasn't tried to make her heroine particularly likeable. Evelyn can be ruthless, manipulative, selfish and frighteningly pragmatic when she wants something. She understands very early that Hollywood is a game and decides that if everybody else is going to play it, she intends to win.
But there is also vulnerability beneath all that armour.
The further I got into her story, the more I understood the difference between the woman Evelyn actually is and the woman she has spent decades allowing the public to see. The glamorous photographs, the husbands, the headlines and the carefully manufactured scandals hide an entirely different life.
And that's where this book got me.
I went into it expecting Hollywood gossip and seven disastrous marriages. I certainly got plenty of scandal, but the real story is about love, identity, ambition, friendship and the price people sometimes pay for living the life the world expects of them.
The Old Hollywood setting is delicious. There are film sets, premieres, fabulous dresses, newspaper scandals and marriages that seem to have been arranged with one eye firmly fixed on tomorrow's headlines. It has that wonderfully gossipy feeling of being allowed behind a door that was supposed to remain firmly closed.
I also liked the way the seven husbands give the book its structure. Every marriage represents a different stage of Evelyn's life, so instead of feeling repetitive, each one reveals another piece of the woman she eventually becomes.
Monique's sections didn't grab me quite as much at first. Whenever the story returned to the present day, I found myself impatient to get back to Evelyn. I don't think that's unusual — Evelyn is such a huge personality that almost anybody standing beside her is going to struggle for attention. Some reader reviews make a similar criticism of Monique's storyline, while others feel her role becomes more important as the novel progresses.
By the end, I understood why she was there.
And no, I'm not telling you.
There were a couple of moments when I guessed where the story might be heading, but it didn't spoil anything for me. This isn't really a book that depends upon a shocking twist. I cared far more about how Evelyn had reached this point and what all those choices had cost her.
The writing is very accessible, which I suspect is another reason the book has become so enormously popular. You can absolutely fly through it. More than four million ratings on Goodreads currently average around 4.39 stars, although there are also plenty of readers who feel the novel doesn't quite live up to the extraordinary hype surrounding it.
I'm firmly with the people who loved it.
Evelyn Hugo is messy, glamorous, infuriating, clever, selfish, brave and wonderfully human.
And somewhere along the way, I completely forgot that she wasn't real.
That's probably the biggest compliment I can give this book.
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