Seven Husbands - One Love
I recently read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and I must tell you... I was hooked from the beginning.
Monique, our journalist and narrator, gets a call out of the blue to interview one of the most famous actresses of the time. The catch is that it has to be Monique or Evelyn’s story stays a secret.
The reason for this is that there’s a connection between Monique and Evelyn, but we don’t find out about it until later on.
However, what I loved most about this book were the underlying life lessons:
Don’t waste time worrying about what everyone else thinks of you. Live your life the way you want to because you might run out of time.
Hold the ones you love close - always.
These lessons can be difficult to follow, but they are even more difficult to learn.
Evelyn learned this the hard way, and in sharing her story, as readers we learn to appreciate the value of going after what we truly want. But with this, we also have to learn to acknowledge what it is we truly want, and sometimes that means giving up something else in our lives.
In Evelyn’s case, not only did she not chase after what she truly wanted, she didn’t do it because she was worried about what everyone thought of her. She was an actress after all, so how she appeared to the public became one of the most important things in her life.
By the time Evelyn decided to chase after what she really wanted, it was too late. Moral of this: don’t waste your time thinking that you have an unlimited supply of it.
The first lesson caused Evelyn to realize that she should have held the one true love of her life close. She was married seven times, but she only ever loved one person. (You’ll have to read it to find out which one it was.)
Slight SPOILER ahead, so stop reading if you don’t want to know!
Evelyn also had a difficult life in that she lost everyone she ever truly loved. Three very tragic experiences that left her alone and ready to tell her life story.
Though this novel is fiction, the lessons are universal. Hold those you love close because you never know when your time is up.
