The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Book Review

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This is a classic “Instagram made me do it” read. I’d seen this everywhere, and absolutely everyone was raving about how good it was! The lovely Hels from @thehelsproject bought this for me because it became one of her all time faves as soon as she’d read it and wanted me to read it too. Evelyn Hugo is a reclusive Hollywood movie star. After an illustrious career full of drama, secrets, and a lot of husbands, she’s ready to tell-all. Surprisingly, she chooses little-known writer Monique Grant to write her story and as Monique hears the stories of Evelyn’s life, it becomes clear the article she thought she was writing, is not exactly what Monique was expecting.

If you’ve read Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six and enjoyed it, then you will certainly enjoy Evelyn Hugo as well – it’s full of the same glitz and glamour and as with Daisy Jones, the characters will be what keeps you turning the page. What Reid excels at is the ability to give her characters multi-faceted personalities, so that the opinion you have when you meet them will almost certainly change by the end of the book.

The plot of this book is intruiging, and by the end, you’ll find it hard to put down. Jumping between the past (Evelyn’s life) and the present of her telling it to Monique, it was so interesting to see it all come together and gradually answer all the questions I’d had from the get go.

As a protagonist, Reid portrays Evelyn as strong, ambitious, and most importantly, completely unapologetic; she made some mistakes in her life, and she’ll admit that, but she doesn’t regret them because she knew what she wanted to achieve – and for the most part, she did.

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In a lot of my positive reviews, I go on about the “humanness” in books, and for me it’s what takes a book from being good to absolutely brilliant. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo does this exquisitely because no matter how famous the characters, or how rich they become, Reid shows their relationships with each other, and the traits which make up their individual personalities above anything else. The quote below is beautiful, and if my review hasn’t already, I hope it convinces you to pick up a copy!

You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until someone stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”