Reviews with content warning for Racism - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

388 reviews

rodent_scribbles's review against another edition

emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A beautiful and complex story about fame, womanhood, queerness, and race. The characters around Evelyn Hugo feel complex and multi-dimensional.

I was not a big fan of the voice in Monique's POV, especially at the beginning, but don't let that put you off. Once Evelyn starts talking, the pages just fly by.

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bean_7088's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Life of a biracial queer Hollywood star throughout their life.

*spoiler review*

It was really nice having so much bisexual representation and how frustrating it is when people assume about you.
I love Evelyn's calculating cunning and all she did to preserve her life and livelihood.

I'm really happy I had some education about that period of Hollywood thanks to Be Kind Rewind on YouTube, made it a little easier to understand some of the Hollywood politics of the time.

While Evelyn loved Celia, I didn't. I was just as frustrated as Evelyn in a lot of their big fights.
Harry was lovely, other than after John Harry... NOT COOL HARRY

I really don't know how I feel about how race was brought into things? I'm definitely not an expert, and very white myself, but it stood out in a way that was clear it was not written by someone with experience. It stood out enough for me to explicitly comment on it.

I still really enjoyed the story from the queer perspective.

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jemmaisntcool's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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kingcrookback's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

...I wish I liked this the way I've seen other people like it. I don't hate it, by any means, but this really didn't live up to the hype for me. I'm all for diving into the nitty-gritty of fame and the panopticon of celebrity. I even found it engaging to tick off the references to real famous people and Old Hollywood stars - Evelyn as an amalgam of Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Didion, Harry's car accident analogous to Montgomery Clift's and his being closeted similar to Cary Grant's - and I appreciated that Reid didn't strain credulity by shoehorning or name-dropping actual celebrities. But the only part of this book's treatment of fame that truly engaged me was

Spoiler

the transactional exchange between Evelyn and her driver after Harry's car accident

because it stood out as one of the only times I could viscerally feel how grimy the business of fame could be.

Little else about the book truly grabbed me. Evelyn was handled in this blandly girlboss-y feminist way and had a jarringly modern understanding of queerness for the 1950s-70s. The amount of time we got to spend with Celia wasn't really conducive to building an actual attachment to her character, ditto Monique. The memoir narrative felt unmoored in time, despite the descriptions of clothing that were supposed to help in that respect. Like, I don't care what people were wearing, tell me about what attitudes were like in that decade, that year. If you want to talk about the fashion so badly, why not make some connection to how clothing can signify in microcosm what was going on in society at large? Once again, I honestly just wish I saw what other people see in this book.

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tdhuck's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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dragon_s_hoard's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Great book! I absolutely loved Evelyn’s story. She was complex and awful and I loved her.
Unfortunately, I can’t quite rate it 5 stars because Monique’s narration drove me crazy. She was a good character, but why did she have to narrate. Every. Single. Action?

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buildingtaste's review against another edition

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emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Fair warning, I am going to over-luxuriate in being a hater, because I took this one personally.
I won't star rate it, because I didn't actually read the frame narrative chapters once I saw that they were going to be in first person present tense. Maybe that side of the story earns the unusually high ranking this has?

Positives:

very quick read.
the section in Spain was lovely.

As for the rest...

Spoiler

Read Evelyn Hugo, they said. It's about Hollywood and lesbians, you'll love it, they said. And... sure, it's ostensibly set in Hollywood, the characters are supposed to be actors in the tail end of the studio era into the new wave and new Hollywood period. But the author doesn't really seem to care about the setting much at all, except as a source of some emotional hurdles for the love story. If she had completely excised real history, relying on a sort of roman a clef version of renamed studios and figures, I could have rolled with it. But instead there were these rare nods to real figures and awards that sent me over-thinking. Evelyn compares herself to Celia and Ruby, but never thinks how her performance might stack up against Katharine Hepburn's turn as Jo March, or Garbo's as Anna Karenina. Her fictional film wins Best Picture in 1982, erasing Gandhi. The real history, where it comes in, is flippant rather than immersive. This Hollywood doesn't feel like it has a history, which is strange for a book that covers so much time, in a place that is so self-aggrandizing and nostalgic for itself. And the lesbians (ok, lesbian and bisexual woman, technically)... I had more time for. The rocky relationship with Celia came to a very poignant, bittersweet conclusion, and I loved their "marriage" in Spain before Celia's death. But the development before that was underwhelming, with their extremely short lead-up and the years they just spent avoiding each other. I wanted a lot more from all Evelyn's relationships than what I got. As it is, the book just seems like a series of quickly-sketched episodes, where despite her claims at being confessional, we get very little understanding of the central character.

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