The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Book Review by Taylor Jenkins Reid 

It’s funny. Two book reviews ago I went on a lengthy diatribe about how giving people books is often annoying and unwelcome (or maybe that’s just me). Recommending and suggesting books I love and can do all the livelong day. 

I encourage people to tell me about their latest foray into fiction or that one novel they haven’t been able to stop thinking about for years, but when you actually physically give someone a book, well. 

There’s pressure involved. 

In that other book review post, A Man Called Ove, I outlined how one of three things would happen if someone gives you a book and you read it:

1. The book is good and you chastise yourself for being a moron and not knowing about it earlier. 

2. The rare occurrence of the book being a home-run and has a place proudly sitting on your favorites shelf forever. 

3. The book sucks, the whole journey was tedious and annoying, and the person who lent the book to you in the first place is disappointed or butt-hurt. 

In the last review it was the third option, and to be fair, it usually is. Oftentimes this isn’t even because the book is bad per se, but more so because the book isn’t for me and my interest in it to begin with was tenuous and shaky at best. 

Fortunately, in the case of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo it was option 1 with a small leeway into option 2. I had never heard of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo before or the author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, for that matter, and when my friend gave it to me I put it off on my shelf to collect dust for several months.

However, as my to-be-read list dwindled down to nothing and my newest shipment of books was not yet ready (I might have been waiting for all those Barnes and Noble gift cards I knew were lurking in unopened Christmas cards) I decided to give it a try, and oh boy, am I glad I did. 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is an adult fiction LGBT novel that focuses on two different timelines running parallel throughout the book. We start off with our main character in the present day of 2017, Monique Grant, a biracial journalist in her 30’s who currently works for a publication called Vivant in New York City but wants more. 

In the midst of an impending divorce, stagnating at work, and missing her long ago deceased father, the only thing Monique takes pride in is a piece she did about euthanasia and how there is mercy in killing before suffering a few years back. 

Her life takes an unexpected turn when Hollywood legacy, Evelyn Hugo, reaches out to her through her job and asks to meet with her. What she thinks is simply a meeting about Evelyn’s recent gown donation turns out to be a life-changing decision where she not only learns about the life and loves of Evelyn Hugo, but also about herself and the choices she made along the way by being tasked to write Evelyn’s biography. 

Monique’s POV is sprinkled throughout the story, thrusting us back into the present every so often, but most of the book is now an eighty-year-old Evelyn dictating her rise to fame from the 50’s all the way to the 80’s and beyond as she lays out the ugly, the beautiful, the sordid, and the desperate actions and choices she made to where she rests as an old woman before Monique, alone, filthy rich, and ominous about the end of her life from a first person perspective. 

To be very blunt, I didn’t care much for Monique. 

I liked the representation of her character, but she often came across as judgy, annoying, and rash. Several times throughout the novel, she has to apologize for speaking too quickly or for jumping to conclusions and for someone who is a journalist I found it to be an odd trait. 

Her growth as a character as a direct involvement with Evelyn was interesting, and I truly enjoyed the fact that at the end of the day, Monique remains a single woman who didn’t want to settle for something less than she deserved. 

That’s more than I can say for most YA protagonists who almost always end up with someone romantically because god forbid they remain alone. 

Evelyn, on the other hand, I immensely enjoyed. 

She’s snarky, manipulative, mean, catty, ruthless, and greedy. 

She’s also hardworking, confident, intelligent, and passionate. 

She came across as a real person to me, a real person with flaws and with qualities I admired. She was kind of a bitch, and I loved that about her. The other characters from Evelyn’s tale, mainly her seven husbands, her friends, and Celia St. James, were also well developed and nuanced characters. 

Nobody was good or bad. Everyone had aspects of both in them and it was so good to see portrayals of characters that resembled real flesh-and-blood human beings. 

As you would expect, there is a lot of scandal, romance, sex, and the glitter and glamour of Hollywood throughout these pages. What I didn’t expect were the themes of race, of sexuality, of gender roles, of death, and of forgiveness. 

Having a bisexual Cuban-American main character detailing her rise to fame in 1950’s America was incredibly interesting from a variety of standpoints. 

To me, though, the biggest theme was about love. 

As the book is called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, there is of course, an explicit understanding that love will play a large role in the novel. What I didn’t expect was the complex way in which love was depicted. 

The author Reid wanted to convey that romantic love wasn’t the only love worth writing about, and how there are all kinds of wonderful and all-consuming loves that have nothing to do with romance or sex at all. 

Parental love, friendship, inspiration, romance, and familial bonds were all represented and not one was shown to be more valuable or more interesting than the other. All of Evelyn’s relationships had merit, and at the end of the day, everything Evelyn did, start to finish, was for someone she loved one way or another. 

In some ways, aren’t we all Evelyn Hugo?

Together with the myriad themes, the alternating timelines, the representation, and the juicy plot, the story was enjoyable from the first page to the last. The writing itself is very fluid and very easy. 

This is not a hard read by any means. The vocabulary was simple and the writing was simple, but it was very entertaining and at the end, even thought-provoking. 

It made me think. 

Was I making the right choices in my life? Or was I settling for easy? For forgettable? Was I holding myself to high standards and getting what I wanted? What I deserved?

Books that make me sit in silence after I finish reading them, tears in my eye because I’m so emotionally overwhelmed are few and far between. This is what I did after finishing reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I simply sat on my couch, mind spinning, and tried not to cry. 

That, to me, is the mark of an excellent book. 

Recommendation: If you like strong and sassy female characters then this is definitely a novel worth checking out. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a whirlwind romance, but perhaps not in the way you would suspect. With fluid writing, engaging characters, a scintillating plot, and themes that will leave you gaping, what better way to start off the year 2021 than by giving yourself a truly fantastic read? 

Score: 9/10

Score: 9/10