The Book:
Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
Published January 14, 2025 by Flatiron Books
Date read: November 12, 2024
Find more January 2025 releases here.
Beautiful Ugly spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Grady Green
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
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.
Beautiful Ugly Spoilers
The Reveal:
This is going to be a hard one to summarize. In short, Grady is an unreliable narrator. Abby is still alive.
Kitty, Grady’s agent, was Abby’s godmother. Both Kitty and Abby were from the island.
Many years ago, a whole class of schoolchildren died at once on the island. Their substitute teacher wasn’t watching them and they all went to play in a cave, and high tide came in and drowned them all. Abby felt responsible as she suggested they go play there (I can’t remember how she survived, but she was the only one).
Some of the flashbacks were to Kitty’s POV, including the creepy airplane SA. “The Woman in Black” was the Reverend Melody Bates, and those confessions were Kitty talking about how she wanted to leave her husband, Charles Whittaker (the writer). The piano lesson SA also happened to Kitty; her mother cut off the piano teacher’s hand with an axe after it happened. That was the hand that Grady found under the floorboards.
Kitty told Grady that the piano teacher and the substitute that let the kids drown were the same man. Sandy killed him eventually when she found out he was responsible for her daughter’s death.
After the incident where the children died, Kitty and Abby moved to London and Kitty started her new book agency. Charles stayed on the island and became a recluse. Abby had asked Kitty to represent Grady.
Back to the night Abby went missing: Grady had found out that Abby was pregnant. He’d had a vasectomy (without her knowledge) so he knew this meant she was cheating on him. He also knew that if he left Abby, then Kitty would stop representing him and it would end his career. Instead, he decided to stage Abby’s suicide to get Kitty to feel bad for him.
Kitty told Grady that Abby actually had conceived via IVF in secret, not cheated on him. Abby had lived (she caught herself after Grady threw her off the cliff I guess?) and went to Kitty to help.
In the present day, Kitty offers Grady a deal: he may continue to live on the island if he is able to produce a bestseller every year, and all the proceeds go to maintaining the island so that they don’t need to rely on tourism. Men aren’t allowed to live on the island or to leave it, meaning that the islanders would kill Grady if he disagreed.
The Ending:
Kitty drugged Grady and he fell asleep. Then the book flashes to one year later. Grady clearly agreed to her terms because he lives on the island, and his book Beautiful Ugly has just become a bestseller. He has hidden a secret message to his readers in the book asking to be rescued. However that night, he is drugged again. He wakes up in a coffin–Abby always knew that his biggest fear was being buried alive. I believe the reader is meant to presume that Abby killed him, because the last thing he hears over the walkie-talkie are the words “I hope you die in your sleep”, which was Abby’s phrase of endearment with him.
I hope these Beautiful Ugly spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
I thoroughly enjoyed Alice Feeney’s most recent hit. This was one of my favorites from her! I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling something, but it was certainly a hit.
While I didn’t exactly like the main character Grady, I was absolutely hooked and had to figure out what was going on with him. Was he really seeing Abby, or was the island playing tricks on him?
The setting couldn’t be beat—I love a remote island, which gives the feeling of a locked room without being a literal room. The other characters on the island only add to the eeriness.
I loved it, definitely add Beautiful Ugly to your TBR. The oxymoronic chapter titles all the way through were also a fun touch!
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