Editors Reads Verdict
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is Taylor Jenkins Reid's most accomplished novel — a sweeping, glamorous, and quietly devastating portrait of a woman who built her entire life around a love she could never publicly claim. It is a book about ambition, identity, and the cost of hiding who you are.
What We Loved
- Evelyn Hugo is one of contemporary fiction's most fully realised characters
- The Hollywood setting is rendered with vivid, specific period detail
- The LGBTQ+ love story at its centre is handled with exceptional emotional intelligence
- The framing narrative creates genuine mystery about why Monique was chosen
- The ending is quietly devastating and entirely earned
Minor Drawbacks
- The framing character Monique is less compelling than Evelyn
- Some of the seven husbands blur together
- The eventual connection between Evelyn and Monique strains coincidence
Key Takeaways
- → Identity hidden out of necessity carries a lifelong cost
- → Ambition and love are not always compatible, and the conflict between them defines a life
- → The stories we tell publicly and privately can be entirely different
- → Queer history is inseparable from the history of secrecy and performance
- → A life can be simultaneously spectacular and privately tragic
| Author | Taylor Jenkins Reid |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Atria Books |
| Pages | 400 |
| Published | June 13, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Contemporary Fiction, Historical Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Readers who love character-driven historical fiction, Hollywood glamour, and emotionally complex LGBTQ+ narratives. |
The Birth of a Literary Icon
When The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo arrived in 2017, it was a quiet release by a midlist author. Within five years, thanks to an explosion of BookTok enthusiasm, it had become one of the most talked-about novels of the decade, and Evelyn Hugo had achieved the rare status of fictional character beloved by millions who feel they know her personally.
The novel works as a frame narrative: unknown journalist Monique Grant is inexplicably summoned to interview the legendarily reclusive Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo, now in her seventies and ready to tell the full truth of her life. What follows is a sweeping, decades-spanning confession delivered directly by Evelyn — and it is every bit as scandalous, romantic, and heartbreaking as the premise promises.
Evelyn Hugo as Character
Reid’s greatest achievement is Evelyn herself. She is manipulative, calculating, and utterly fascinating — a woman who weaponised beauty and used men as stepping stones while never losing the reader’s sympathy, because Reid never lets us forget the structural constraints that made those choices feel necessary. Evelyn grew up poor and Cuban in a Hollywood that had no space for who she actually was, and every calculation she makes is traceable to that original wound.
The seven husbands are largely vehicles for the actual story: Evelyn’s love for Celia St. James, the actress who is the true great passion of her life. This relationship, necessarily hidden across decades of American history, is what the novel is really about — and Reid writes it with the kind of emotional precision that makes readers feel the loss of every year Evelyn and Celia spent performing heterosexuality.
Period and Place
The Hollywood Reid conjures spans the 1950s through the 1980s, and she renders it with delicious specificity. The studio system’s control over actors’ private lives, the particular cruelties of fame during the celebrity magazine era, the ways in which the closet shaped an entire generation of entertainers — all of it feels researched and embodied rather than decorative.
The Framing Narrative
The novel’s one weakness is Monique herself, who functions more as a vessel for receiving Evelyn’s story than as a fully independent character. The eventual revelation of why Evelyn chose Monique is clever, but it requires a coincidence that some readers find too convenient. Reid partially anticipates this criticism and addresses it within the text, though not entirely to everyone’s satisfaction.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — A sweeping, glamorous, and genuinely moving novel built around one of contemporary fiction’s most unforgettable characters.
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