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killercahill📖 Quick Take:
This isn’t just a story about seven husbands. It’s about one unforgettable woman—ambitious, unapologetic, and endlessly complex—telling the truth on her own terms. Evelyn Hugo will make you love her, hate her, and ache for her in equal measure.
✍️ My Thoughts:
You know those books that pull you in and make you cancel plans? This is one of them.
Taylor Jenkins Reid serves up Old Hollywood in all its glittering, cutthroat glory—but strips away the polish to show the bruises underneath. Evelyn Hugo is magnetic: a Cuban-American woman reinventing herself, chasing fame, and paying the price for both in a world built to consume women and discard them when they stop shining.
The framing device—a present-day journalist interviewing Evelyn for a tell-all—is clever, though I wasn’t as invested in the modern storyline as I was in Evelyn’s confession. And what a confession it is: marriages for love, for survival, for convenience; friendships that feel like lifelines; and a romance so tender and tragic it gutted me.
This book asks big questions about identity, sacrifice, and what it means to live—and love—authentically in a world that punishes you for it. It’s dazzling, devastating, and—fair warning—it will wreck you in the last 50 pages.
Why not five stars? A little predictability in the twist and a framing character I didn’t fully click with. But the emotional core? Perfection.
✨ Vibe Check:
- 💎 Old Hollywood decadence
- 💔 Heartbreak and reinvention
- 🏳️🌈 Queer love and quiet resistance
- 🎥 Scandal, secrets, and sacrifice
- 📚 The price of ambition
💬 Favorite Quote:
“Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.”
⭐️ Final Rating:
4.5 stars. Glamorous, gut-wrenching, and impossible to put down. Evelyn Hugo will live in your head rent-free for a long time.
