Alex the Book Reviewer

Elias Cannetti is the kind of writer that makes me realise I will never be a writer. I mean, to be fair to myself he is a Nobel prize winning writer so he's pretty much top of his game so I like to think it's an unfair comparison but the way he writes about what he sees and how those things make him feel is just stunning. I don't know if it's his writing skills or that he actually feels things in a different way from me. He seems to feel so intensely and deeply and understand what those feelings are. I mean, I feel things. The way a view or a sunset can fill me with the most intense contentment. That everything is right. It's not even a feeling in the heart, it's the whole body just feeling full of the beauty of the view. I like old buildings. I like to put my hand on old buildings and absorb the ancientness. If I can get away with it, I like to stand there with my hands on it, close my eyes and just try to feel the history. I always hope that when I open ...

I read Taylor Jenkins Reid's previous book Daisy and The Six a little while back. I loved it but had to google about 500 times whether it was a true story or not. So, this time I was thankfully wise to her ways and knew that Evelyn Hugo was not a real-life glamorous movie star. However, even if I hadn't read Daisy and the Six, I don't think I would have found this one as confusing. It is written as the product of an interview but in a novel/ auto-biography style whereas Daisy and the Six is written as a full transcript of the interviews. Monique Grant, a journalist at the very beginning of her career, with a couple of successful blogs under her belt and a job as a junior writer at a fashion magazine, gets a call, via her work, from mega-star Evelyn Hugo requesting that she writes an article about an auction of outfits she is about to donate. No one really knows why Monique but she, of course, leaps at the chance. When she gets there Evelyn tells her that, in fact, she w...