The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Publication Year: 2017

Type: Fiction

Genre: historical fiction, LGBTQ

Read on 2018-12-09

View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞

View on Goodreads ➞

★★☆☆☆

Pretty chill, kind of a book you read to pass the time.

A lot of telling and very little showing - like, don’t tell me Evelyn having a daughter changed her, show me. We go through Evelyn Hugo’s entire life and apart from her move to Hollywood as a teenager, she literally does not change or grow a stitch the entire book.

Bisexuality and other LGBTQ themes were so heavy handed that I honestly felt like I was being lectured like a child sometimes. The girls and the gays deserve art and this was not it. Complex bisexual experiences in fiction don’t need to read like the Trevor Project web page on bisexuality. Enriching media and literature with “awareness” also doesn’t need to be this condescending. Maybe the target audience is in fact straight white ladies who’ve never heard of a bisexual in their life but god at least make it interesting.

Evelyn’s Cuban background is also written pretty tastelessly, only referenced when she’s deciding whether or not to speak Spanish to her housekeepers and otherwise pretty much brushed under the rug.

I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO EXPRESS HOW LITTLE I CARE ABOUT MONIQUE THE NARRATOR/JOURNALIST. The book is about Evelyn Hugo but the driving force of the plot seems to be the big secret about Monique at the end?? This is absurd. By the time we got to it I was just exasperated - just stick with Evelyn plain and simple don’t open and close with a half-assed half-character with no development and to whom reader has zero attachment. Evelyn Hugo is by far the best and most interesting part of this book so it’s really not worth it to do this forced The-Neverending-Story type of bookending.

The queer family dynamics were cool, but also just brushed over. No details, no showing, just telling. I think Evelyn’s relationship with Harry is most telling (ha) of this - they meet in a professional capacity and then like a few pages later Evelyn is narrating how she loved him and he was the most important person to her??? Um??? Maybe don’t skip the finicky bits of actual story that needs to happen to get us to that point.