Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

Jan 23

Synopsis

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible – a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.

Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

*Blurb taken from The StoryGraph

Review

This review contains spoilers for both Rock Paper Scissors and Beautiful Ugly.

Characters: We open this novel following Grady Green, an author of thrillers who, on the night of celebration for his latest release, is on the phone with his wife when she disappears. Grady has one goal throughout the novel—write his next book. Which he does by stealing the manuscript of the late novelist, Charles Whittaker. From the first chapter, I found Grady to be a whiny man-child, and I’m happy to see that Alice Feeney took this text in a feminist direction by pointing out the subtlety of such manipulations, then providing consequences for them. At no point did I grow warm to Grady, but I believe that was intended. Up front, it’s clear he is an unreliable narrator. He has insomnia, which gives him hallucinations, and he also drinks (unbeknownst to him at first) a hallucinogenic tea.

I’m not even certain what to say about Abby (both Abbys?) because of the end twist. So, I’ll leave my commentary on this character in the “Predictability” section where I mention how the reveal made a broken visual of both POVs in this novel. So far as secondary characters are concerned, they were distinct, but not very fleshed out.

Plot: Per usual, Feeney had me hooked right from the beginning and, despite my frustrations, held my attention to the end. However, not a ton happens throughout the novel. When I think back on the story, most of it is taken up by Grady suffering internally through his hallucinations, his thoughts of his wife, and his guilt over stealing a dead man’s manuscript. The pacing here was slow, the build of the mystery a crawl. And while that doesn’t tend to bother me, my main complaint here (aside from what you’ll see in the next section) is that this took so many of the same elements from Feeney’s 2021 novel, Rock Paper Scissors.

RPS also has a husband who is a writer and who cares more about his books than his marriage. The wife there also reshapes herself to better support her husband’s aspirations, losing her own identity in the process. There were even allusions to RPS that (because it has been so long since I read it) made me think that perhaps these were the same characters, and the twist at the end would be some sort of hypnosis. The wife in both novels wants to/does cut hair with scissors as a form of vindication. There are robins mentioned constantly in BU, which is the name of the wife in RPS. The husband in RPS has a disorder that keeps him from recognizing facial features, and there is a distinct moment in BU when Grady can’t separate his wife, Abby, from the islander, Aubrey, because the facial features blend together—kind of like prosopagnosia. In RPS, the wife hits a women in a red kimono with her car. In BU, Grady’s wife stops her car in the middle of the road the night she disappeared because there was a woman in a red coat lying across it. In both novels, there is an old, reclusive male author who kept himself hidden away in a remote area, never did any author events, and died before he could send his latest manuscript. In BU, that man is Kitty’s husband, and in RPS, it’s Robin’s father. I mean, even writing all of these similarities out has me gaslighting myself into thinking I missed something and the two books are in the same universe following the same people. The coincidences are either insane, or BU copied the same ideas as RPS and tried to rework them. I think Rock Paper Scissors was a brilliant novel and Feeney’s best work; it will be hard for her to beat it. Trying to reuse that same recipe here, though, utterly failed.

I’m also confused by what this novel is meant to be, because Feeney makes an attempt to break the fourth wall at the end of the story. As it turns out, the novel we’re reading is Grady’s book, and there is a hidden message in the pages of the story. Except, he tells Us (you and me) that there is a hidden message, but in his supposed novel, he leaves it hidden there in the hopes that a “reader” will discover it and save him, and that the islanders will kill him if they find out what he did. Which, depending on how you interpret the ending of this story, they do. Except, that means Grady wrote about his own death in the novel he published that we are reading … ?

I do realize I’m thinking too hard about it. But, honestly, it doesn’t make sense. I don’t think Feeney pulled this additional little twist off. And if I weren’t so disappointed and discombobulated by the rest of the novel, that might not have irked me as much as it does, but it’s an added layer of what?? on top of everything else.

And none of this is to mention the semi-supernatural elements emphasized, like the mist and the cries of the children near the sea. It was … a lot. Too much.

Predictability: While there are some things that are obvious (the island is home to only women, the women are connected to Abby via her stories, they all have an intense fascination with Grady’s novel and his career as an author), the two twists at the end shocked me and, quite honestly, felt like a cheat.

The reveal that Grady is the one who tried to kill his wife took me aback. There was no allusion to this. In fact, even after Grady’s murderous plot was explained, I went back and reread the beginning of the novel. There was no Oh my gosh, with this new perspective I see things differently! moment. Knowing what actually happened didn’t change how that chapter sounded—which was that Grady was home while on the call with his wife, he heard someone else get into her car, and then he ran down the cliff road to find her vehicle abandoned. It wasn’t a misinterpretation born out of reader-assumptions; it was literally how Feeney wrote those moments step-by-step. While this slightly different timeline of events could be because Grady is unreliable as a narrator, that doesn’t fit either. Grady is unreliable because he isn’t certain what around him is or not real, but he does remember his own actions and reactions. For us to have gotten constant inner monologues about how he knows Abby is alive and how he refuses to believe she would leave him despite the money being taken from the bank account, only to have him turn around at the end and clearly rehash how he did think she was dead because he was the one who killed her, and for his reasoning behind the failed-murder to be that he did think she was going to leave him, blew my mind. In bad way. It flipped his entire narrative so that it felt incohesive with what had happened so far. You know, like it was purely for the sake of the plot. And inorganic. And contradictory to what had been written thus far.

I also felt put off by the reveal that Abby’s chapters weren’t from Abby-Grady’s-Wife, but from Abby-Charles’s-Wife, who now goes by Kitty. Feeney made a similar twist in her famous Rock Paper Scissors, but I adored it. The same can’t be said here, and it took me a moment to parse out why. Abby’s chapters felt important because we thought we were getting the flip side of Grady’s marriage. He and his wife were experiencing the same events but viewing them differently, and that disconnect, that miscommunication, gave a sharper visual of who Grady was when we weren’t in his head. It added to his unreliability. This entire image shattered and became pointless with the unveiling of who Abby’s chapters were actually from—Kitty, Grady’s agent. Abby-Grady’s-Wife felt important, integral, a necessity to understanding the story and the plot and the main protagonist: Grady. Kitty was nothing more than a secondary character who helped launch the plot into motion at the beginning, then faded into the background. (For contrast, in Rock Paper Scissors a similar POV twist happened, but it felt like an awakening. Both characters were equally important to the plot, so the POV reveal was crazy cool and had me spinning with delight. The switch made so much sense and was based on reader assumption, not a purposeful timeline alteration by Feeney.) In Beautiful Ugly, to learn we were getting the POV of a secondary character who ended up being important-ish right at the end, chafed.

Craft: Feeney always has such beautiful writing. Her capability to create one-liners that gut punch me and make me contemplate life keep me coming back to her novels, no matter what. I love the way she crafts her prose as both immersive and detailed, but also sharp and to the point. There’s no doubt that this woman can write. Which means I will continue to snag her books, despite my disappointment in the plot of the last two I read. She creates such intense atmospheres that leap off the page. Her craft is the sole reason this novel got a decent score.

Overall Thoughts: I’ll always snag a Feeney because I can’t get enough of her prose. Even in Daisey Darker, which was decent at best, I tagged nearly the entire novel because the lines were that good. Her turns of phrase blow me away. But this plot has me irritated. If I hadn’t read Rock Paper Scissors, I don’t think I would be as abashed. But so much here feels like a rip-off of (in my opinion) Feeney’s best novel. And it confused me throughout because I drew so many comparisons that I genuinely thought she was referencing her previous publication throughout.

She wasn’t.

There was some good here. The feminist take in this novel was welcome, and there is commentary within these pages that truly spoke to me. But the execution as a whole wasn’t there, and I’ve read that other, fabulous novel from this author. I know she’s capable of a phenomenal story. This just … wasn’t it.