Book Review: Beautiful Ugly

Spoilers!

“If you are reading this, I am trapped on the island; please help me.” That’s not how Alice Feeney’s 2024 book, Beautiful Ugly, begins, but how it ends in a most unexpected, twisting path to get there. At first, I thought we were doing a “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” situation, but Feeney had something far different in mind than some Dickensian tale. Although, in a manner of speaking, it became the “best of times” for a certain population of women.

Abby and Grady are a married couple, the former an ardent, steadfast journalist trying to uplift the voices of the downtrodden and the latter a rather desperate author trying to uplift his own success. In Dickensian fashion, Grady learns he’s going to be a New York Times best seller for the first time on the same night Abby disappears after a bizarre encounter on a cliffside road near their home. A year later, Grady is trying to rebuild his life, but there’s not much life happening, and there’s certainly not any writing. Thankfully, he has Abby’s godmother, Kitty, as an agent, and she not only funnels money to him, but recommends he goes to this fictional Scottish Highlands-inspired island, the Isle of Amberly. Yes, there is a map at the start of the book of this Isle, replete with goofy cottage names, like the Last Straw, Middle of Nowhere, and so forth. I love a book opening with a map! A previous best-selling author, Charles Whittaker, used to live on the island at a cottage fittingly known as the Edge since it’s on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. He committed suicide in his cabin, but Kitty thinks this get-away at this cabin is exactly what Grady needs to deal with his grief and rejuvenate his writing career. Grady takes some of his possessions and leaves with his dog, Columbo.

Interspersed with what’s happening with Grady is the perspective from Abby the week before her disappearance. In contrast to Grady’s viewpoint of their marriage, Abby seems ready to, well, disappear. Which some in the public suspect happened: she left Grady of her own volition. Seemingly talking to a therapist, Abby recounts how unhappy in her marriage she is, owing to Grady’s selfishness and unyielding devotion to his “books.” A red flag that not all is as it seems is their “meet cute” story. Grady up to this point had been depicted as antisocial and inward-facing. In this meet cute, he’s confident, audacious, and sexually uninhibited. One could argue that’s the arc of a fading romance: hot and heavy at first and fades over time, which is what Abby is struggling to confront.

Feeney has a great couple lines in the book about the dynamic Abby is trying to explain to her therapist — the dynamic in a failing marriage, as it were:

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

Oof.

Regardless of the opaqueness of what is going on, I didn’t trust Grady as reliable narrator and I didn’t trust Abby as a reliable narrator, which left me stuck because those are the two viewpoints of the book! Also, Grady is not likeable. He’s a bit cowardly, and at least where Abby is right in her estimation, self-absorbed. Furthermore, upon discovering Whittaker’s unpublished 10th novel, he plans to pass it off as his own! What the heck?! No self-respecting writer would ever do that. That’s abhorrent. And yet. On the grief front and/or the hallucinogenic tea he’s being given by Cora at the Corner Store, he’s seeing Abby everywhere on the island. Worse still, someone is leaving her old articles (which, another knock against him, he hasn’t read!) at the cabin. Grady can’t make sense of what is happening.

Now, when an island is at the center of the story as the Isle of Amberly is, my brain goes to immediately suspecting the island’s inhabitants of being part of a cult and/or the ultimate antagonists of the book. That’s just how these things go! But given Feeney already had Grady suspecting that and other characters joking about it with him, it seemed unlikely. That said, the island’s inhabitants, of which there is only about 25, seemed to abhor visitors. Aside from general disdain with the nature of tourists (dirtiness and complaining), we learn what the real trigger point is for the inhabitants: the “Children of the Mist.” Years ago, 30 children drowned after a music teacher was derelict in his duty to watch them. Ever since then, no children have been born or raised on the island.

Feeney’s book reminded me a bit of Jeneva Rose in that, at the end of the book, as we’re wrapping up, we get twist after twist after twist. So, let’s see if I can recall it all. First, Grady runs into a woman he swears is Abby. She plays it (or we don’t know she’s playing it yet) like she’s not Abby and has no idea who Grady is. Then, she shocks us further by accusing Grady of setting up the whole cliffside disappearance by their house! The original story is that Abby was on her way home, saw a girl in the street, and stopped to render aid. She disappeared thereafter. The story, as told by Abby is that Grady was the “girl” and when Abby came close, he chloroformed her and threw her off the cliff. He tried to murder her! Fortunately for Abby, she survives by the luck of a branch and returns to her home, the Isle of Amberly. As it turns out, Abby was one of the children from the “Children of the Mist,” but she survived. Kitty, the godmother, her real name is Abby. All this time, the Abby perspective we were getting was from Kitty, not our Abby, and it was Kitty talking about leaving Whittaker. Which she did to start her book publicity company. The Isle of Amberly survived for years not so much off of seasonal visitors to the island, but from Whittaker’s book sales. Moreover, the derelict music teacher? The women of the island killed him. Which is another thing that I didn’t realize until it was spelled out by Feeney: there are no men on the island (other than Grady) and that was intentional after the music teacher situation. These are women sick of the patriarchy and determined to live on their own (there was a nice turn-of-phrase from Feeney about how no man is an island because they need women, but women need nobody on their island, albeit fellow women!). Ultimately, Abby, Kitty, and the rest of the inhabitants lured Grady to the island on the premise of writing a new book, and then messing with him about Abby’s appearance on the island as payback for Grady’s attempted murder of Abby. Kitty then plays to Grady’s ego, which as the self-absorbed man he is, he buys, that they will keep him alive on the island if he becomes their new Whittaker: writes successful books to support the island. Grady envisions just this happening, but in reality, he’s facing his worst fear, being buried alive. Weirdly, Abby and Grady had a thing they said to each other before going to bed, “I hope you die in your sleep,” as a morbid affectionate way of saying I love you (basically, I love you so much, I’d rather you die in your sleep than any other manner). As it turned out for Grady, he did die in his sleep. But in his fantasy before death, Grady imagines that his best-selling book, Beautiful Ugly, had a code in it for the outside world, where the first letter of the first 14 chapters revealed the code. That code was the one at the start of this review: “If you are reading this, I am trapped on the island; please help me.” Very clever from Feeney.

But hey, presumably Columbo, a “man”, is still alive at the end of the book and able to stay on the island, so, there’s that. After all, like I’m immediately suspicious of an island’s inhabitants, I’m immediately suspicious of an author’s intent with introducing a dog character. Luckily, as I said, nothing bad happened to Columbo, just his owner.

It was a lot of twisting and exposition of the twisting to explain the twisting, but largely, I think it worked. The one part I didn’t buy as much was that Grady would have the capacity to attempt to kill Abby. But as for his motive, he thought Abby was set to leave him because he found out she was pregnant, which he figured was impossible due to his vasectomy (which he didn’t tell her about!), but she was pregnant due to IVF (which she didn’t tell him about!). It’s not so much that her singularly leaving was an issue for Grady; it was that her leaving meant the severing of his relationship with Kitty, which meant he’d lose his book career. See, it was always all about the books with this guy! What a loser. But yeah, given how self-admittedly cowardly Grady was, I can’t see him trying to kill anyone, even for his precious books.

Regardless, Feeney’s book was a compelling read, a fun what-is-going-on thriller, and a twisty (on top of twisty) ending that for the most part worked.