read

Initial reaction: whaaaaat

I didn't cry in the parts that I thought I would, but I cried.

Good, good book.




Now on a serious note:
So what this book is about is love and all the different kinds of love. Platonic love, romantic love, sexual love, abusive love (if you can call it that), motherly and fatherly love. Also it is about all kinds of relationships that are not related to love, but to respect or transactional relationships or relationships between boss and employee and how much power either can have over the other. So much good stuff in this book. So many themes. And that's not even the whole plot of the book. But for this reason alone, I really like it.

You, yeah you, should totally read it. But no pressure. ( )

Evelyn Hugo, a self-centered, ruthlessly ambitious star of mid-twentieth century Hollywood, relates the details of her personal life, and the effects of her fame to an up and coming journalist.
Most characters were one dimensional, selfish and unlikable. ( )

I may have enjoyed this book more if I had not just read several powerful international books that told stories of human suffering, pain and resilience. By contrast this story felt very insular, self-absorbed and inescapably American. This is the story of a fictional Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo, celebrated in the 1950s to 1970s for her beauty and sexuality. As she tells her life story and the tale of her multiple marriages to journalist Monique Grant, she unveils the extent of her willingness to do anything, compromise herself in any way, and use everybody to achieve her aims; including sacrificing her culture, identity and her relationship with the one person she truly loved. In some ways this reflects the difficulties faced by women in the film industry but on the other hand it just reveals the ugliness of the celebrity culture we live in and the way movie-stars can think they move in a different dimension and are above the common rules of morality and ethics. There was one very predictable reveal at the end of the book and one more surprising one. I know many people enjoyed this but it wasn’t really my cup of tea, and I think I allowed myself to be seduced into reading it based on a pretty cover and it matching a challenge prompt about Hollywood. ( )

I saw lots of great reviews of Evelyn Hugo, but I didn’t love it. The story was medium-level interesting and the writing is good—I just didn’t love it. The pacing didn’t keep my interest for the duration. It was just okay for me. (The twist at the end is solid, though.) ( )