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

medium-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

My main problem with this book is that it is not entertaining, and its writing is mostly bland.

For how much this book is hyped about being good representation for LGBT people and a good LGBT story, I found it extremely out of touch with how LGBT people talk and view the world. The conversations, discussions and conflicts around it are not only unrealistic - they don't make any sense. 

The best conflict in the book for me was actually the part that was interesting and with the best writing in the whole story, actually engaging and presenting depth to the main character, but it gets resolved in like one chapter and then almost never brought up again, even though the story did allow for it to bleed into the rest of the book. 

I do think the spousal abuse and violence was depicted fairly realistically, and it was engaging to see how Evelyn reacted to this and dealt with it, and the resolution was not completely satisfactory but that is actually good writing there, because it is supposed to be unfair. But then she only ever speaks of him in the past and not once in her relationship with Celia does this traumatising lived experience come up... only weird biphobia.

 

And the ending seemed extremely rushed and not that well thought out for any of the parties involved.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Drug abuse, Sexual assault, and Domestic abuse