Beautiful Ugly: How did your thoughts and feelings about this book change as you completed each chapter?

My first thought was that this was another Gone Girl type of story. Then, I suspected Kitty’s involvement as soon as she handed over cash and keys to the cabin. But then I started to suspect that this was another unreliable narrator story and felt a little frustrated that the entire experience was all a hallucination. Then, I thought that the entire island was drugging him and I could not piece anything together. Finally, I just gave in and stopped trying to guess and by that time, all was revealed. A wild ride!

From the beginning, I thought that Grady is an unreliable narrator; he distorts or misinterprets reality. There is evidence that their marriage is not as mutually happy as he thinks. ” I believe in you. It makes me so happy to hear her say that. It also makes me sad because she shouldn’t.” At first, I thought that Abby staged her own disappearance to escape from an unfulfilling marriage. The large withdrawals from their joint account seem to support that. Grady doesn’t really know his wife, booking an ocean cruise for someone is afraid of the ocean. He also appears to be controlling; his wife had to be with him when the call came about his status as a NY Times bestseller. “I hope you die in your sleep” is the creepiest way of expressing love I have ever heard. His agent Kitty offers him a cabin on the Isle of Amberly where he can live and write which belonged to a previous client who had died and willed it to her, but there is the implication that once you’re on the island you can’t leave. Grady is an alcoholic and an insomniac which causes him to see his wife in places where she shouldn’t be, long before he begins drinking bog myrtle tea which is hallucinogenic. In the cabin, he finds the bones of a hand under a floorboard and a manuscript which belonged to Charles, the previous writer in the cabin. After all, the sign in the cabin says that “the only way out is to write.” Grady decides to make it his and send it to Kitty. Things disappear from and appear in the cabin, so I’m beginning to think that the intention is to drive him crazy and I think at this point that Kitty and Abby are working together. After reading that the basic plot of Whittaker’s book is a writer trapped on a remote island, I began to think that this whole story is the book, that Grady is living what is in the book, confirmed by Grady giving the book the title Beautiful Ugly. Grady finds Charles Whittaker’s headstone and a freshly dug hole in the cemetery. At least three people in the village are subjects of articles which Abby wrote for the newspaper. Grady finds out that Charles committed suicide and had a falling out with Sandy who read all his books, even the ones not published. He panics because the manuscript mailed to Kitty is Charles’ last one and Sandy has read it and would know Grady did not write it. Charles’ obit, written by Abby, reveal detail contrary to what Grady knows. I wondered if he was reading his own obit. Eventually, Kitty appears on the island and we learn her story and connection to Abby and how she found out that Abby was alive. “Then I dried my tears and told her that I would destroy you.” But he has to provide income for the island by writing bestsellers which is what Charles did. The ending of Grady being buried alive really surprised me, but I figured that Kitty had found the secret message in Beautiful Ugly where Grady told that he was trapped on an island and needed help.