A review by buildingtaste
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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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