The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Book Review

 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

*This review contains spoilers* 

*Content Warning*

This review mentions suicide and terminal illness.

Introduction 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is often regarded as one of bookstagram’s darlings. It’s received an outpouring of 5 star reviews from across the book-loving community. And there truly is a lot to like about it, from its old Hollywood aesthetic to its unapologetic cast of LGBT characters, and its complex morally gray protagonist. 

But does it live up to the hype?

The answer for me is yes and no. 

Summary and Review

Like I said, there is a lot to love in this book. It has LGBT characters in all the leading roles (featuring a gay man, a lesbian woman, and a bisexual WOC), with a W/W main couple—which is something I love. Most mainstream and popular novels always center around straight characters and couples, and if they feature queer characters, they’re usually just relegated to the background. I truly love that Reid isn’t afraid to make all her leads LGBT and push the heterosexual characters to the background. It’s such a shake up to the status quo we’re used to in our popular fiction. 

Our leading lady, Evelyn Hugo herself, is also such a morally gray, complex character that she’s so interesting to read about. And we have the way that Reid plays with a dual perspective timeline. 

The chapters that are told in the past (1950s-1970s) are told from Evelyn’s own perspective, but they’re written in the sense that she is retrospectively telling her life story to Monique Grant, the journalist interviewing her for her biography. The chapters taking place in present day are the ones told from Monique’s perspective, which makes for a very unique and fun story structure. On top of that, Reid also interjects little interludes between chapters that are written in the style of newspaper articles and magazine headlines. Not only does this add to the underlying themes about fame and the invasion of privacy that the media commits against big name celebrities, but Reid also cleverly uses these short sections to reveal tidbits of information regarding things that happen in Evelyn’s life between the full-length chapters that Evelyn is recounting to Monique. So the reader stays up to date with all major points of Evelyn’s life story, but Reid doesn’t have to overextend the length of her novel by devoting chapters to every single year of Evelyn’s life, which prevents the novel from getting too long in the tooth. Really it’s a brilliant setup to formatting this type of story.

I also love the way that listening to Evelyn’s life story influences Monique and helps her find her footing in her own life and character development. Some critics of this novel will argue that Monique doesn’t get enough character development, to which I would argue is, while true, not a weakness of the story. Based on the way the story is told, the reader is presented with several decades’ worth of Evelyn’s life, but Monique’s role in the novel only covers the length of a few weeks. It makes that her development, then, should be less drastic than Evelyn’s because it’s expected that people change more over the course of decades than weeks. 

I also loved the development of Harry Cameron’s character, and his friendship with Evelyn. That being said, I’m a bit conflicted about how I feel on Harry and Evelyn’s decision to have a child together. A sham marriage to hide their sexualities during a period of time where it wasn’t safe to be queer I get, and I really love that they are so close that they have each other’s backs like that. Especially because Evelyn’s girlfriend Celia and Harry’s boyfriend John were also in a sham marriage, so it actually benefited them all very well. But the baby thing…

On one hand, I love that Evelyn and Harry had a friendship that deep and committed. I also love the exploration of the fact that being LGBT doesn’t have to mean giving up on having children or a family, plenty of queer folk want and have that. But it’s kind of the way it went down that I wasn’t sure I liked. For one thing, I really can’t reconcile my feelings over the fact that this plot established that Harry—a gay male character—had sex with a woman a lot. Do we really need gay (or lesbian for that matter) characters to explore sex in hetero scenarios to help reaffirm their sexuality? If straight people can know they’re straight without having same-sex experiences, then I say we should extend the same mentality to queer folk and accept that one can know they’re gay without having to try a heterosexual experience first. 

It was also clear that Celia wasn’t comfortable with Evelyn regularly having sex with someone else repeatedly to get pregnant—especially after Evelyn got pregnant before when she cheated on Celia with Mick Riva. (And yes, that was cheating)—but that she relented just to make Evelyn happy. Evelyn acted as if she didn’t even care how it was making the woman she loved feel, nor did it seem like she had grown properly after losing Celia over the Mick Riva one-night-stand either. If Reid had just developed this aspect of the story more and showed more complex depth in Evelyn for it, I would probably like it more. I just really wanted some indication that Evelyn had learned from the previous mistake and grown from it, but we don’t really get that. 

That also leads me to what my biggest criticism of the novel is: Celia did not have the necessary development that her character required. I loved the idea. She and Evelyn went from rivals to friends, then their closeness caused Evelyn to question her sexuality, and they became on-again-off again lovers in an era that didn’t respect LGBT identities. Usually I don’t like the on-again-off-again trope, but for Evelyn and Celia I was okay with it because of the idea that having to conceal their identities and relationship (along with the added pressures of being overexposed celebrities in general) caused the relationship to have too much pressure to bare sometimes. The idea that they had to take breaks from each other actually felt realistic to their circumstances and helped establish the themes of the story, which is the way that a homophobic society hurts LGBT people. 

But the problem is that we saw too many of the off-again moments. I really wish we had had more build up to Evelyn and Celia getting together. Then once they got there, I wanted more moments of the happy and secure moments in their relationship, so that the reader could better understand why they keep coming back to each other, even after all the pain and drama. The moments we did get were amazing, but there just wasn’t quite enough of them. With just a little more development, this could have been one of the most compelling relationships I’ve ever read about. It was only just shy of reaching that mark.

Harry Cameron, however, in my opinion, mostly got the level of character development that I think major side characters in stories require (the level which I feel that Celia also should have also had). I loved the way Reid showed how Evelyn’s fame and infamy affected their daughter as well as how Evelyn struggled to raise her after Harry’s death. And, of course, I was devastated by Harry’s death. In fact, I think his death hit me harder than Celia’s or the implication of Evelyn’s at the novel’s conclusion. 

As for the ending, I did predict most of it, but not in a “this is cheesy and predictable and lame” kind of way. More in a “wow, Reid plotted the clues perfectly and I followed them” kind of way. I was so proud of myself for getting there on my own! As soon as Harry died in the car accident with his new lover, and that Evelyn staged the incident to make it look like Harry wasn’t the one driving (God this scene was gut wrenching, by the way), I started to predict that this was Monique’s late father, and that this was the reason that Evelyn sought her out in the first place—not just because of the published piece that Evelyn had found that she wrote. 

Although, can someone explain something to me? After the car accident, Evelyn concludes that the reason Harry was driving drunk that night was because his boyfriend had given him a letter, explaining that he couldn’t leave his wife and daughter for him, and Harry was heartbroken. But then… Harry’s boyfriend was in the car with him while he was driving drunk. So what is the timeline here? James gives Harry the breakup letter, Harry drinks because he’s devastated, but then later they’re in the car together after the affair was ended? If it was already over, then why were they together after Harry drank away his misery? Am I getting that timeline right? It just seems a bit odd. Someone who understood this point better than me, please explain, I’m begging. 

I suppose the only reason I don’t hold this minor plot inconsistency against the book is because Evelyn is mostly just conjecturing what she thinks happened after the fact. She doesn’t know for sure, and since Harry is dead, there’s no way for her to confirm or deny it. 

Another thing I thought was powerful about this book was the way that Reid chose to use green as the color the symbolizes Evelyn as a character. Typically, people tend to think of red as the color that represents so much of Evelyn’s personality: passion, danger, sexuality, power, status, etc. But green is not only less cliche than red in this instance, but it’s also clever. Green can represent: 

• Jealousy and envy: Evelyn’s relationship with Celia starts with a rivalry rooted in jealousy over Celia’s popularity and potential to outshine Evelyn in a film they star in together.
• Wealth and money: Evelyn become a rich and wildly famous celebrity. 
• Nature and health: Which invokes the idea of fertility, and Evelyn has two pregnancy based storylines. 
• Luck: Evelyn is lucky enough to get her big breaks into acting.
• Disgust: Many of the things that Evelyn is willing to throughout the novel is pretty hard to defend, so readers may frequently feel disgusted with her.
• Sickness and disease: We learn at the end of the novel that Evelyn has been diagnosed with breast cancer, likely to be terminal, as her own daughter also died from it. 

Thinking about all this, green really is the best color to represent Evelyn’s character and her story. 

The ending might not hit for every person who reads the novel, but I was mostly fine with it. 

Usually, I don’t like the “symbolic marriage” trope (where a couple don’t ever get the chance to get actually get married, but they symbolically say vows or acknowledge themselves as married anyway). I think it cheapens the tragedy of one of the characters dying, because it would be much more tragic if the pair never actually got a chance to make their vows prior. I’m actually okay with it here, though, for two main reasons. 1.) It takes place in a time period when same-sex couples couldn’t get married, so the symbolic marriage between Evelyn and Celia was the best they could have, and 2.) The book is literally broken down into sections based on what man Evelyn is currently married to, so having it end with her considering her last marriage to be to a woman is clever and ironic. There may have been seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but the only one who mattered in the end was her one and only “wife.” It’s actually a good concept this time. 

The reveal that Evelyn had breast cancer at the end might seem sudden to some readers, but honestly I don’t know that there’s a way for a character’s breast cancer diagnosis to not be sudden. Reid did sort of foreshadow it along the way, as there were always moments sprinkled into the story where characters felt compelled to point out Evelyn’s breasts, and in one of her fights with Celia, Celia even (quite callously) states that Evelyn’s fake is due to have nice breasts. Looking back, you actually realize how frequently Reid was purposely drawing attention to Evelyn’s breasts, and once you get to the end, you realize it was done for a purpose greater than to sexualize Evelyn or even to just highlight the way that the media constantly uses women’s breasts to define their attractiveness. It was actually foreshadowing something, like the way it was handled or not. 

And, of course, the bigger twist at the end.

First we figure out that the real reason that Evelyn hired Monique to write her biography is because she is James Grant’s (Harry’s lover who he inadvertently killed, which Evelyn covered up) daughter. But on top of that, we know that Evelyn did read Monique’s most famous published work… a piece on the rights of patients with terminal diseases to “die with dignity” (medically assisted suicide). And so when we learn that Evelyn has cancer, we realize how she really found Monique’s piece. She wasn’t actually trying to find James Grant’s family. She was most likely looking into options regarding medically assisted suicide and stumbled upon the article, and the realization of who Monique was just fell into Evelyn’s lap. Reid really mastered the double plot twist with this one, and it blew me away. 

My enjoyment of the ending might seem morose given that we are left with the implication that Evelyn commits suicide in the end, but I didn’t enjoy it because I, in any way, think suicide is the answer. Rather the tragedy feels befitting to how Evelyn was set up as a character. By this point in Evelyn’s life, everyone she loved (Harry, Celia, and her own daughter now too) have all died. Also, since her daughter died of the same ailment, Evelyn saw the suffering first hand that she herself would go through if she let the cancer take her life instead, and she didn’t want that for herself. She’s a very strong-willed and dignified character, so it actually makes sense with who she is that she would seek to take the power into her own hands, no matter hoe tragic or morose it happens to be. 

I also love the last meta play on the title. The book isn’t just called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo because the character Evelyn Hugo had seven husbands in her life, but also because Monique chose that as the title of Evelyn’s biography. I also love the final line, in which Monique quotes asking if Evelyn cares if she gives the biography that title, and Evelyn is fully in support of it because, in the end, her husbands were just husbands, she is Evelyn Hugo, and she thinks that everyone will be much more interested in hearing about her wife anyways. 

Final Thoughts 

I would ultimately give The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo 4 stars out of 5. It was wildly enjoyable, mostly well written, with a great cast of primarily LGBT character, but not perfect as many fans might tell you. It’s also written in a fun and creative way. There are just a few plot points and characters who I felt should have been developed and touched on more. 

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