She has done it again. Wet eyes the final 20 pages. How does she do it?

How does she make you care so much about relationships between these characters, with Frances & Joan, Joan & Vanessa? How does she make you feel that exact thing you’re supposed to feel about Barbara, her self-centred victimhood?

She spares just enough time, and no more, to the background character, so they can contribute to the plot, without distracting from it, yet not being tokens either.

Sure, the dialog is intense, obsessed with childhoods in a way that feels plot-serving without being real.

But wow, Taylor Jenkins Reid will make you FEEL.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo -- Taylor Jenkins Reid

Highlights

if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’

Even bad people are good when its easy

Perhaps humans should not do this. The shuttle was nothing more than a pair of wax wings.

And even though you knew better, you’d allow yourself a moment to believe you were worthy of being revolved around, too.

From up there, everyone is so alike, they have so much in common, and they can’t see it.

In 1903, The New York Times declared that we were still one to ten million years away from a flying machine….. Some of the most notable engineers in the world said it was impossible…sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers did it.

it took us one hundred and twenty years to go from a man in a hot-air balloon to the invention of the airplane…But then only fifty-eight years to go from the first airplane to the first man in space.

babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from.

“All right, kiddo,” Joan said. “T minus zero. We’re outta here.”

Great example of how Reid builds emotional suspense, and then bursts the balloon in one line, and it all bleeds out.

Joan allows herself a moment to picture it: Vanessa’s feet back on Earth.

I remember reading this line and thinking: This really could go either way.

Houston, this is Navigator. Do you read?

Tears. Reid got me, again.