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

Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

784 reviews

badbadwolf's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

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amandaacat's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring sad 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? It's complicated

5.0

This is one of the best books that I’ve read in a long time. I actually listened to the audio book and couldn’t put it down. Taylor Jenkins Reid has written something so timeless and in a way that keeps you entertained throughout. The characters are so real and Evelyn’s story is so heartbreaking and magical. I’ll be thinking of this book for awhile.

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jess_always_reading's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective tense 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

Big breath, okay.

I'm writing this after just finishing this incredible novel and there are still tears drying on my face because THAT ENDING.

If I could rate higher than 5 stars I would, this story is beautiful. Jenkins Reid has crafted a suite of characters that are so completely human, complex and evolving, lovable and flawed. A story of love in all its forms, of survival and the way the wounds of our childhood stay with us. Of the pain of living in hiding and in fear. Of a life filled with love, struggle, and loss.

Evelyn Hugo is a bisexual icon and my heart hurts for her and the many real people who lived and continue to live now in hiding. As a bi+ queer myself, this was so powerful that it left me teary. Don't we all want to find our Harry and Celia?

Lastly, I love the way Jenkins Reid writes Evelyn telling her story. It reads like someone sharing their truths and, in its telling, reveals even more about Evelyn's incredible character.

100/10 would recommend!

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emjay2021's review

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emotional reflective medium-paced

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

4.5

Absolute page turner. If you had asked me before if I was that interested in the lives of Golden Age Hollywood movie stars, I would have said, eh, not really. But I could not put this down and essentially read it in two sittings. The story works like this: Monique Grant, a junior writer at a Vanity Fair type magazine, is given a plum writing assignment, a cover story on the glamorous 80 year old former movie star Evelyn Hugo. It turns out Evelyn asked for Monique specifically but won’t reveal exactly why. So, Monique turns up at Evelyn’s New York apartment and hears her life story, warts and all. Interspersed with Evelyn’s rags-to-Hollywood-riches story are snippets from Monique’s life: newly separated from her husband, who has moved from New York to San Francisco for a job.

I thought the parts with Evelyn far outshone the bits with Monique. But we do discover by the end why Evelyn chose Monique specifically, and the book earns back a little bit with that ending.

I thought it was an excellent yarn, and the way the story was told (first person narrative by Evelyn for the most part) was a wise choice. You really do feel like an old movie star is telling you about her life.

There’s nothing particularly earthshaking in here, but that said, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the narrative addressed social issues like homophobia, racism, and sexism. I was also a little surprised at just how moved I was by the ending of the book.

I enjoyed this at least as much as Daisy Jones and the Six, maybe a little more. I didn’t listen to it as an audiobook but I bet it would be a good one.

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lucyhicks's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.25

This was such a beautiful look into how much life can change in the span of just a few years, and how complex human relationships are. That love comes in so many shapes and sizes and your entire life can be turned around by just one decision is so beautifully highlighted here. It’s well-loved for a reason!

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heidi_thompson's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense 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

4.5

Just from the dedication, I knew this would be a good book and wow… was I right. I love how it highlighted the complexity of human nature because, after all-

“no one is all good or all bad… but sometimes it’s easy to forget how true it is. That it applies to everyone.” (Page 366)

I also enjoyed both her primary romantic and non-romantic love stories. There’s many different forms of love and this book emphasized that well.

Finally, the way that women lived her life despite the patriarchy and even manipulated the male gaze to her benefit was inspiring. Yes, all us women are gorgeous but we are also so much more than that. We are intelligent, strong, courageous, kind, and cunning in our own ways and I think the character Evelyn Hugo encompassed these feminine qualities well.

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wardenred's review

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emotional reflective 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

3.75

All of these things you’re so desperate to know, I promise I’ll answer them before we’re done. But I’m not going to answer them one minute before I want to. I call the shots. That’s how this is going to go.

Well, this was… a source of lots of mixed feelings. I absolutely adored Daisy Jones & the Six earlier this year, so I expected a lot from my next book by Taylor Jenkins Reid, especially since I’ve heard so many good things about this one. But where with Daisy Jones, the “written mockumentary“ format added a lot to the story, here, the “writing Evelyn’s memoir“ framing device fell flat for me. I feel like I see where the author was going with it; it offers that extra smoke screen, a level of separation between the reader and the larger-than-life movie star. Unfortunately, it ended up feeling more like a gimmick and, more often than not, a distraction.

It didn’t help that Monique was one of the most uninteresting characters I’ve “met“ lately and did absolutely nothing interesting as a journalist. It was also cringy how from the start, given this unique opportunity to write Evelyn’s tell-all, she immediately jumped to the husbands angle and the “Who was the true love of your life?“ question, especially since that question was asked before she had any hint of Evelyn being queer. Here you sit in front of a woman who’s been a cultural phenomenon for decades, her creative work influencing generations, and the main thing you want to know about her life is… which man in her life defined her? Meh. Honestly, even with the fact that Evelyn’s actual true love was a woman, I find this approach cringy, because while love is important, we all exist outside of our relationships, too, romantic or otherwise. Or rather, we exist in many relationships at once, and outside them, and between them, and to define one person solely through one specific romantic relationship is odd. Not to mention that I generally tend to roll my eyes at that “one true love“ concept, because it’s possible to love more than one person in a lifetime, and no one love should diminish or erase others.

I do feel that the story itself eventually did a good job of addressing these things. Evelyn does make a point of reaffirming that while Celia was the love of her life, she had genuine feelings for some of her husbands, too, and she also loved other people in a non-romantic way: Harry, Louisa, her daughter, her mother’s memory. So in retrospect, that heavy-handed pushing of the “so which husband was the most important, hmm?“ question as the central thread for the memoir was a very smart choice: create a faulty premise, contradict it with a follow-up. But something about the way it was presented at the beginning grated on my nerves.

I mostly enjoyed the character development here, even though, with the exception of Harry, there was hardly a single character that I liked. Evelyn was quite interesting; I liked how she didn’t shy away from admitting her flaws, and how while she didn’t hide that there were pretty awful things in her life that shaped her into the person she is, she refuses to paint herself as the victim and makes it clear that she made her own choices with what happened to her. She’s not a particularly likable character, but definitely a strong and compelling one. Harry was both interesting and likable; I admired how he toed the line between Hollywood cynicism and personal kindness, and how he was always there for Evelyn but also pushed her when she needed to be pushed, and pushed against her when he didn’t agree with the choices she tried to make for everyone. Celia, frankly, often annoyed me, but I did like how she was presented in the narrative: how Evelyn always spoke of her with so much love, but also showed enough of her flaws for the reader to be able to see them way before they got acknowledged. There were a few other characters who got to show up multiple times and grow and change over the decades in way that inspired no real sympathy in me but made me want to know what happens to them next. On the other hand, there were others who were barely more than slightly fleshed-out stereotypes.

What strikes me as odd was how little acting and film-making there was here, for a book about an actress. Evelyn talks a lot about the consequences of being a Hollywood star: the fame, the money, the recognition, the Oscars. But it’s only rather late in the book, and only for the sake of one specific plot point, that the actual *art* of it all gets some real attention. It was a stark contrast to Daisy Jones where songwriting and performing music took up a huge part of the narrative. Perhaps that’s because as a writer—also a creative artist—Reid had more to draw from as she wrote about people creating art, but a character’s who’s a performance artist was harder to tackle.

Overall, I liked it more than I didn’t, but I also felt like this was a queer story written very much with a straight eye, and in the last part of the book, it was all getting kind of… repetitive and needlessly dramatic for my tastes. I also wasn’t a big fan of the many rather obvious life wisdoms / truisms being presented as these life-shattering revelations. And I maintain that a lot more could be done with that framing device.

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