"I hate Evelyn, but I think I like her very much. I wish she never existed, and yet I can't help but admire her a great deal."
This is the story of Evelyn Hugo, her beauty made her famous and her desperation to hold onto her fame kept her in successfully famous. We meet her after her acting career. No one has heard from her in years but the mystery surrounding her and her seven husbands is still of public interest. In her final years, she is ready to tell all her secrets by spilling them to an unknown reporter named Monique. When Monique gets the call she is dumbfounded. She has no connection to Evelyn Hugo, and not much of a career to even prove herself worthy of such a story.
This book reads like a Hollywood insider piece mated with a salacious gossip magazine. That may sound like criticism, but it is not. This book was nearly unputdownable, but much like reading a gossip magazine, the pay off is mild entertainment without invitation to challenge the reader.
I had a great deal of issues with this story, but I cannot air all of them because they are major spoilery plot points. I don't know how to rate this book for many reasons, but I think the biggest thing I am struggling with is the story to emotion ratio. So much happens in this story, but the emotions of the actress are held at a distance both from herself and the reader. This could have been done intentionally by the author and I can see why that would help support Evelyn's story, but after reading and LOVING Daisy Jones and The Six by the same author, I felt like she could have executed this in a better fashion. The problem here is the author wrote about a character and highlighted her fame and notoriety and didn't bring her humanity to the fore front. As a result of what I would consider a big oversite in characterization, Evelyn Hugo's character lacked the grounding to fully pull this story arc off. It is worth mentioning a second time that there is a VERY good chance that the author did this intentionally, but it just didn't work for me.
The ending made me feel a little messed with, but honestly that was on me for not reading into the foreshadowing. The author tried to warn me, Evelyn Hugo's vilaneous track record tried to warn me, but I was too caught up in the juicy story to care. Shame on me!
Taylor Reid Jenkins has not lost me as a reader. I will likely read every single thing she puts out, but if you are deciding between giving this a read or reading Daisy Jones and The Six, go for Daisy Jones.
3/5 Stars
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