The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Published: June 13th 2017 by Atria Books
Genre: Romance, Fiction, Chick-lit
Pages: 391

It being feburary, the month of love and valentines, I’ve decided to pick up a romance novel. I was prepared to find it cliché and annoying, how wrong I was.

“It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be both good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.”

This book serves it up! The hollywood dish that we all know and love, and it is so very very entertaining. It begins with Monique, a journalist just starting out, being asked to interview the icon Evelyn Hugo. Everyone wants the inside info of Evelyn’s life and this is the opportunity to get it. It’s just like the gossip column, but with a little more insight and depth.

“I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.”

Evelyn seems very loosely based on several iconic actresses, like Elizabeth Taylor who is known to have had many husbands, the platinum blonde bombshell that screams Marilyn Monroe, the americanized latina Rita Hayworth and the secret bisexual of Greta Garbo. You can’t help but feel that there are real secrets revealed in the pages of the book.

“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I see Evelyn as I see myself and everyone else just trying to find their way through this jungle we call living. We follow the opportunities laid in front of us, sometimes it leads us great places, other times we stray off the path and end up in a ditch, but we keep moving. The book doesn’t paint perfect pictures, it doesn’t glamorize hollywood or riches or marriage. It does the opposite, it glamorizes a simple life, one that I think we’ve forgotten in the search for our 15 minutes and the hunt for social media likes. It tells us that the most important thing in this world are the people we love and the time we spend with them. And how great isn’t it to find books that remind us of that?