Plot Summary – In this entrancing novel “that speaks to the Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in us all” (Kirkus Reviews), a legendary film actress reflects on her relentless rise to the top and the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine. Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

★★ 

I have to say I was really disappointed by this book. I took a long time to read it, but I also took a few months to read Normal People by Sally Rooney and that was because I felt it was so heavy and dense that I needed time to process each bit. On the other hand, this took me a long time because it was just a chore to read. The dialogue was infuriating and it felt like the author hasn’t lived in the real world in years. This book felt like what GPT-3 (the text equivalent of DALLE) would give me if I asked it to generate a book. Cliche after cliche made me feel like I was reading 30 pages ahead cause I knew how most plotlines would end. The book also felt extremely repetitive, things happened again and again and characters barely grew. The relationships in the book which form the crux of it tell us THAT the relationship is great but not WHY. There’s no showing in actions or witty dialogue of why characters are ‘made for each other’ or ‘not a match’ without the narrator explicitly telling you so. It leaves you with a book that feels like riding a bicycle with training wheels. I am not allowed to form my own opinions or introspect about a character’s choice because the narrator will inadvertently spell out for me in a really poorly written ‘deep’ internal monologue what the moral of each story is. I never felt connected to Monique or Evelyn. These are just the structural issues I had with the book. The content itself was also very messy. Every time it tried to deal with any social issue, the privileged white woman in the author showed as she handles everything with not even the slightest nuance. Everything is black and white and only gets a surface-level exploration because that’s all the author could provide with her limited experience. So the world doesn’t feel lived in, and the reader is made to feel even more distanced. The characters themselves are all fairly one-dimensional barring the titular Evelyn and some characters even feel like they have no purpose other than to push the plot of the story forward. I feel like such a villain pointing out so many flaws in this book but I cannot believe the fanfare it has. Not to be condescending, but I genuinely don’t know how people like this book. With most things, I can understand but it felt like this was the work of an egomaniac who had no one to edit the book and tell her that no human beings talk like this, or even think like that for that matter. The last 50 pages of the book are definitely much better than the rest and I felt gripped towards the end but it was too little too late by then. It rushes the emotionally poignant ending while having pages of nonsense and drivel that serves no purpose to the plot or the character development. Frankly, I would not recommend this book to anyone and I was really disappointed by it.