Beautiful Ugly is a thriller by Alice Feeney, an author whose previous books I have mostly enjoyed, unfortunately this one fell a bit flat for me for several reasons.
This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t read this book yet and plan to, and don’t like spoilers you should stop reading now.
The blurb for Beautiful Ugly sounded right up my alley, and the story drew me in from the first page which was very promising. Within only a few pages though, I started to suspect the main character, Grady, was lying and it made me speculate as to the real story of the disappearance of his wife Abby. Maybe I’ve ready too many thrillers, because unfortunately for me, I guessed the main twist of the story, and although I tried to forget it, it kind of ruined the reveal near the end, so it wasn’t as shocking as it should have been.
The middle of the book dragged for me, because it felt like not a lot was happening. It got very repetitive watching Grady have the same encounters with the islanders, getting paranoid, then think he was hallucinating, over and over again. It had me checking how much of the book was left, multiple times as I was reading.
Now comes the main spoiler part of this review, and the main reason I this book fell apart for me.
According to Grady, the night Abby disappeared she was on the phone with him the whole time when she found a woman in the road, got out to check on her, and then disappeared. Near the end of the novel it’s revealed that Grady was disguised as the woman in the road, and he threw Abby over a cliff in an effort to kill her. The fact that it was raining, and they were on a cliff road with the ocean below, and Abby didn’t hear anything suspicious while they were talking could have been explained away as Grady lying about his account since he was proven to be an unreliable narrator. But near the end of the book, when Abby finally told her account of the night in question, it completely matched his . It just didn’t make any sense to me that he could have pulled off pretending to be a woman lying in the middle of a road on a rainy night, without giving himself away.
And then there was the ending. if you’ve read this far I don’t want to spoil the entire book, just know It was a bit of a mess and made no sense. In fact the whole reason they brought him to the island made no sense, whatsoever. Overall this was a disappointing book and just an okay read for me.
Life, Tea, and Everything 