Beautiful Ugly

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 by Alice Feeney
• Published: Macmillan Audio on January 14, 2025
• Genre: Thriller, mystery
• Listening length: 9 hours 19 minutes
• Dates listened: 9.23.25 – 9.27.25
• Format: Audiobook (borrowed on Libby)
• Narrators: Richard Armitage, Tuppence Middleton
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• ⭐⭐½
• 🌶🌶

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Wooooh boy!! This book seriously pissed me off! It started off super strong for me. I was fully ready to give it a 4.5-5 star rating, because I just knew that this was going to have an incredible ending. But OMFG!!!!! *gives Alice Feeney the middle finger* What the absolute…

I had never read any of Alice Feeney’s books, that I’m aware of. But I had seen her multiple times recommended on various social media sites that I follow. I’d even seen a few rave reviews on this specific book. I have literally had this on a request hold from my library on Libby since April, you guys! If there are that many people clamoring to get their hands on this book, it has to be good (I thought). I wonder if everyone else was as disappointed as I was. It was SO not worth the hype.

I really enjoyed the plot and the book’s pace in the beginning. It had me excitedly listening, wondering where in the heck Abby had gone?! What happened to her? And why are all these women on the island so….strange? It didn’t even cross my mind to notice that there were zero men on the island, except for the resident author who had passed away a few years prior, and now the current resident author, Grady. This becomes an important point in the plot at the end. But I never even gave it a second thought. All of the book’s themes and lessons about women’s empowerment, how love can turn to obsession, and the warning of isolating oneself, became totally lost on me because I just became angry with the author’s choice to use unreliable narration.

At work, I am a different version of myself—someone confident and well respected—but at home, I am just the wife. It’s like I am playing a role I didn’t audition for, but nobody tells you that the script of your life sometimes changes when you say ‘I do.’

(From this point on, there are spoilers, so beware)

Look, I get that unreliable narration is huge in books with plot twists, specifically in thrillers and mysteries. I get that, and for the most part, I’m ok with it. But the way that Feeney does it in this book just seems like a really cheap ploy because it felt like it was intentionally misleading. I started wondering about halfway through, why the MMC’s (Grady) version of his marriage and his wife wasn’t quite adding up to the FMC’s (Abby) version that you hear during her therapy sessions. The first time I picked up on this was the very first “therapy session” that you hear from Abby’s POV. She’s telling the story of how she and her husband met. Up to this point, from Grady’s POV, he is an introvert who prefers books and dogs to people, and Abby is a light that shines bright and everyone loves. But when you hear “Abby’s” POV of their first meeting, she admits that she blows off “the man on the plane”, basically being a flat-out bitch to him, but he’s relentless in his pursuit of her, and she has zero interest in him until she learns that he’s a writer. She’s intrigued by him enough that she ends up letting him (a total stranger) finger-bang her under a blanket on the plane! This in no way sounded like something the Grady or Abby we’ve met so far would do. Well, guess what!? That’s because it wasn’t! It wasn’t even a story about how Grady and Abby met! It was a story about how Kitty, whose real name turns out to also be Abby, and her husband Charles, met! WTF!!!!

But what pisses me off is that there are some of Abby’s POV therapy sessions that are very clearly about Abby, not Kitty. Because she does discuss wanting a child, that she’s pregnant, and knows that Grady doesn’t want to have a child, and this is how she knows she needs to leave him. So how exactly is the reader supposed to know which Abby you’re talking about? This is what I mean by a cheap ploy. You very strategically misled the reader. It wasn’t even unreliable narration; it was flat-out lying to the reader. Not cool. Maybe I’m being a whiny bitch about it, but I don’t like the feeling it left me with. Like I was played. I understood the twist of Grady actually being the reason that Abby went missing, because he tried to kill her, and therefore, his unreliable narration is for the story to unfold to show he’s losing his grip on reality. That and that’s just the type of narcissistic piece of shit that he is. I probably would have still given the book a 4-star rating had that been the end of it. But the whole Kitty/Abby lie just really got under my skin and made the whole story seem even more unbelievable.

I think I’ll move any Alice Feeney books that I have on my book wishlist down to the bottom. I get that some people probably loved this book and are huge fans of Feeney. To each their own. 🙂