The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in AMS Book Club at UBC

Jul 06, 2022 Jerlyn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-favourites

yes yes absolutely yes. I had no idea what to expect going into this and it far exceeded everything I had thought. This book had me crying sobbing shitting my pants losing my damn mind the entire way through 😭 I can't even begin to explain the waves of emotion that I felt with this book.

4.5? 4.8? I dunno but this is definitely gonna end up on my favorites shelf :") it reminded me of The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot (I refuse to think of that book to much or else I will cry) where an old ...more

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Nov 18, 2022 Robin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own

i am full of sadness

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May 07, 2022 Sophia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Ok I actually feel like this is a ~4.8 star rating! The only reason I have those .2 stars off is because I felt that Monique could have been more developed. We get to know Evelyn so well and I felt really connected to her, but when it came to Monique’s smaller chapters, I wasn’t as connected. So when Monique’s story also comes to a climax, I wasn’t as affected as I was with Evelyn’s.

Other than that though I loved this book! It was so engaging, super fast-paced, and Evelyn was highly entertainin ...more

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May 15, 2019 jing | aperipateticbibliophile rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: i-cried, favourites, swoon-worthy, heartwarming, queer-lit, diverse-reads, page-turner, powerful

98% — 4.9 stars

Spell it out if you have to.

Say that Evelyn Hugo doesn't care if everyone forgets her name. Evelyn Hugo doesn't care if everyone forgets she was ever alive.

Whew, another great read for the year.

Obviously this book has been the talk of the community in 2018, a few months after it was actually published in 2017. All everyone would ever praise was the magnificent Evelyn Hugo, and how much of an impact this book had on their life. Admittedly, I was intrigued, and I finally made th 98% — 4.9 stars

Spell it out if you have to.

Say that Evelyn Hugo doesn't care if everyone forgets her name. Evelyn Hugo doesn't care if everyone forgets she was ever alive.

Whew, another great read for the year.

Obviously this book has been the talk of the community in 2018, a few months after it was actually published in 2017. All everyone would ever praise was the magnificent Evelyn Hugo, and how much of an impact this book had on their life. Admittedly, I was intrigued, and I finally made the decision to go out and buy the novel, opening it a couple of weeks later to dive headfirst into this wild adventure.

As such, I was stunned. The addition of news articles makes it even more compelling.

The last half of the novel was incredibly intense, and I finally managed to finish the rest of it within the evening. Unfortunately, the beginning was slower than I would've liked, and I didn't immediately click with the writing style and characters. Evelyn annoyed me, Monique annoyed me, Freddie especially annoyed me. But as the story continued, as Evelyn revealed more and more of a past that never should've been so tragic, I began to really appreciate her as a person, despite all the bad choices she'd made. She's ambitious, and I admire that. Evelyn Hugo is the heart of this story. Even the revelation of the connection she bore to Monique never damped her ability to command the page (it shocked me, it really did, and I had to go back and examine past chapters of the book to get the full picture; the reaction, however, wasn't too plausible, although the revelation I found alright, if not a bit rushed).

This is her whole point, isn't it? This is why she wants to be so acutely understood, with such perfect word choices. Because she wants to be seen exactly as she truly is, with all the nuance and shades of gray. The same way I have wanted to be seen.

This novel is brilliant because it explores a part of history that we've often seen but never put so starkly on display in ink. It explores everyone's individual sexuality and how we choose to harness it; it explores how truly difficult it was to be different, to be yourself in an industry that is toxic to the core, when appearance matters over all else to everyone that could be watching; it explores how entertainment was really shaped by the audience, and how they choose to ignore certain things to favour their own wants; it explores the strain this has on maintaining relationships, and on finding a lasting one in the first place; it explores the hardships faced if you were a woman, if you were not white, if you were not straight, and what it means to do whatever it takes to reach the top; it explores grief, and heartbreak, and how powerful the truth can be.

In short, I adored it, in all its complicated layers.

"I think being yourself—your true, entire self—is always going to feel like you're swimming upstream."

...more

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Jun 29, 2021 Laura♡︎ (SleepyPages) rated it it was amazing

4.5✨ i don’t know how to feel 😢

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Apr 22, 2021 Ziyana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

this book was incredible <3
2nd read: the way I blew through it in a day even though I know the entire plot already.. stunning book

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May 06, 2021 Soph rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-that-made-me-cry

I’ve read it twice now and it will forever be my favourite book to ever exist

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Mar 06, 2022 gloria ♡ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Sobbed SO many times. Such a beautiful story of love and loss

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Jul 18, 2021 maggie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2021, books-with-lgbtq-representation

This exceeded every expectation I had for it

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Dec 20, 2017 Tshepiso rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017-favourites, adult-fiction

This book was amazing. I came into this book expecting an entertaining story about the life of a Golden Age Hollywood starlet akin to a Marylin Monroe biopic and what I got was a layered complex tale of a morally ambiguous bisexual cuban women

Tara Jenkins Reid managed to create such a compelling character with Evelyn Hugo, someone who I admire for her courageous drive to take what she wanted no matter what was standing in her way and who unapologetically did some horrible things for herself and ...more

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Sep 19, 2021 Alysha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: on-the-bookshelf

Wow. This book blew me away right from the very beginning. It gripped my attention and didn't let it go. I could not stop thinking about it since I picked it up. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo follows the story of the most beautiful and hugely famous Evelyn Hugo, and what it took for her to climb the ladder of success in Hollywood. Even though Evelyn Hugo is objectively not a good person, her manipulative and troubled life is written with such compassion and empathy. This book made me cry, so ...more

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Apr 02, 2018 Tiffany rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

I have never encountered a book like this. I loved the style in which it was told. The newspaper articles and the storytelling concept were amazing. The characters were also so incredibly well-developed and the way all the characters were tied together was so complex and unpredictable. One second you were rooting for them, the next second you loathed them. One very minor detail is that this book may be more suitable for older audiences because there were a few parts that were slightly uncomforta ...more

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Jul 08, 2021 Jessica Hermus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: my-favorites-of-all-time

crying so it gets 5

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May 03, 2022 Bella Dufresne rated it really liked it

This took me a while to get into but once I was in I was hooked. The only thing I’d really complain about is that I strongly dislike the prose. Idk why. Maybe it’s just because it’s so simplistic it kinda felt like I was reading a middle grade book 😭. Not what I expect from adult novels. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a great storyteller but a bad writer. Anyways I also would’ve read this faster if I wasn’t on vacation but it was still pretty solid. Would’ve been 5 stars if it had good prose

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