The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Lynnie

Amy    
  
fiction

Lynnie's Review

What an unexpected pleasure to spend some time getting to know Evelyn Hugo and the people who orbited around her life. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo alternates between Evelyn's evolution from her Cuban, New York upbringing to becoming a darling of the studio system and Hollywood beyond, and a current view of Evelyn's life as she tells her life story to a hand-picked biographer. All of the characters were interesting, even when they were being horrible and maybe even more so when they were being horrible. If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in a celebrity lifestyle (even a fictional one), you will really enjoy Evelyn's tale. The only thing that kept me from giving the book a full 5 stars is that some of the conversations in the book were eye-rollingly self-aware as a few characters in particular sounded like they were having conversations they had rehearsed with their therapists before hand; it got a little heavy-handed with the life lessons sometimes for sure.

Still, this was a fun, easy read that captured my imagination while I was reading it. It's the first book I've read by Taylor Jenkins Reid, but I hope not the last. 

Amy's Review

This novel was captivating despite the fact that I really don’t get into all the Hollywood movie star drama and, if anything, this novel validated all the reasons that the movie industry has never left me star-struck. In fact, the industry was painted even worse than I imagined it through Evelyn Hugo’s experiences.  It’s a cut-throat, political business with many terrible people who use each other to make it to the top.  Despite this, the characters were engaging (even though I did not like Evelyn Hugo despite softening toward her at the end), the telling of the story was well done, and the mystery about why Evelyn Hugo had selected Monique Grant to write her life story was compelling.  I wanted to keep listening to the audio book to see how things turned out.

The three narrators all did wonderful jobs. I have heard Julia Whelan and Robin Miles in previous audio books and was introduced to Alma Cuervo in this one.  I give them all As.  They weren’t perfect, but they added to my enjoyment of the novel and were great voice actors.