Wow. I can’t say too much without giving away a lot of details, but I really need to stop getting suckered by Alice Feeney’s books. Daisy Darker was just a two star read to me, but this latest is just 3 stars mostly because until the whole book went off the rails, it was pretty freaking good. I just wish that Feeney had tied up a ton of plot holes in this book. I thought the ending was a mess too by the way. I can guess what happened, but I think a lot of readers at this point are just going to be fed up with an ending that you can’t trust because of everything that came before it.
Beautiful Ugly follows struggling author Grady Green. Grady is dealing with the disappearance and loss of his wife, Abby a year earlier. Grady doesn’t think he can write another book, but his editor, and Abby’s godmother, Kitty, suggests that he go to an island off the coast of Scotland to write. A famous author used to live and write there and now that he is deceased for some time, Grady can go there and write. Grady arrives and finds himself seeing his wife Abby everywhere. He knows it can’t be possible she is there, but he also starts to find news articles that Abby wrote before she disappeared. On this island of only 25 people, Abby can’t be there, can she?
Look, Grady sucks. There’s a lot that we find out about him (slowly by the way) and you just feel a whole range of emotions towards the characters. I settled on him sucking though pretty much at the start and that stayed there. We get to “know” Abby through her meeting with a woman in black that is positioned as a marriage counselor. The book jumps back and forth between Grady, Abby, and readers getting to read Abby’s articles. And the articles all are dealing with women and some violence being done to them. On the island of 25, you get to know some of the characters, but outside of the character of Sandy (ferry driver and law enforcement on the island) there’s not much there there. Instead you are mostly stuck in Grady’s head and wondering if what he is seeing and hearing is actually happening.
The setting of the island sounds beautiful, but of course we get some of the ugliness of the place. Finding out about the history of it, the fact that birds won’t nest there, and another secret that takes a long while to be revealed.
I think the ending was a mess. I just could not with everything that is revealed and I didn’t believe any of it. I really wish Feeney had gone a different way here.