The Seven Husbands or Evelyn Hugo

Welcome back with another edition of- The Nerdy Girls Guide to Good Reads. This last year I caved in and downloaded TikTok. While I was scrolling and discovered BookTok and learned more about all the most recent highly rated books. I stumbled upon a recommendation for A Court of Thrones and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. I decided to go and get the book to see what everyone was talking about. I immediately fell in love with the book and ran back to the store to get the rest of the series.  After finishing the series in about a month, I began looking for other recommendations for books. I then decided to read, Verity, by Colleen Hoover. I am not one for thrillers, but I was unable to put this book down as well. I have now become obsessed with book recommendations from Booktok. The good the bad and the ugly! Don't care! I'll read it. Especially now that I'm not in school for the first time in 20 years.

This year, I decided that I was going to read as many book recommendations as I could and provide reviews on all of them. I bought 4 new books to read that came highly rated on Booktok this month. The first one I started with was one of the top rated books of last year. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was given a 4.5 out of 5 on Good Reads. This is the second book written by the author. The first book is another highly rated story called Daisy Jones & the Six. I haven't read Daisy Jones but that is on my list as well.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo goes behind the scenes of an award winning movie stars life and the drama that goes along with it. We begin with the story of Monique, who is a struggling writer for a magazine called Vivant. To everyone surprise, Monique is chosen by Evelyn Hugo to do a feature for the magazine due to her generous donation of her gown to the cancer society. Since Monique is still fairly new to writing, she as much as anyone wants to know why she was chosen. This curiosity leads her to accepting the challenge and goes over to write the feature. Turns out that Evelyn as an ulterior motive and ask Monique to write her memoir rather than the feature for the magazine. This comes as a shock as a memoir of this magnitude is set to make millions of dollars. Nothing comes without a price as we learn later in the book. Monique agrees to writing the memoir as long as a feature can be done as well, so she can keep her job and get a promotion. After Evelyn agrees, we then dive face first into the life of the star. 

The story is broken up based on each husband at the time. Evelyn's story is what I imagine Elizabeth Taylor's life to have been like during that time which is full of excitement, new experiences and tragedy. The real question that everyone is asking is, who, out of the seven husbands was the love of Evelyn's life. We go through her discovery of her own sexuality and not just being a sexual being. She figures out what love is and heart break and true anger. We discover that life is not just black and white, it is also grey and the fluctuations of grey during a lifetime. This book is very important because it highlights a lot of the stigma faced by individuals during that time. Black, White, Hispanic, Straight, Gay, Bisexual, you name it. 

I give this book a 4 out of 5 stars. There were sometimes where I would lose interest during the story line due to Evelyn's entitlement, which would just frustrate me and want to skip ahead. It was sometime predictable as well, so I lost some interest at some parts. Overall, I thought it was a good read.