Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

---

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5) — BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Alice Feeney: When Unreliable Narrators Start Gaslighting Me 😤

👉 Buy Beautiful Ugly on Amazon (affiliate link)

---

🚨 Trigger Warnings

This book contains:

• Graphic violence 🩸

• Substance use 🍷

• Emotional abuse 💔

• Child sexual abuse 🚫

• Child death 💀

• Suicide ☠️

Please proceed with care if any of these are sensitive topics for you. 💛

---

🧠 My Thoughts Before the Summary

I’ve read a lot of Alice Feeney at this point: Rock Paper Scissors, Daisy Darker, His & Hers… and let me tell you, the woman loves her unreliable narrators. Like, not just a sprinkle of “hmm, can we trust them?”—no. I’m talking full-on “I’m lying to you in my own POV” unreliable. 🤥

It worked brilliantly in Rock Paper Scissors (that twist still lives rent-free in my brain 🧠), but here? In Beautiful Ugly, it started to feel less like clever misdirection and more like she was yanking the rug out just because she can. 🫠

Another classic Feeney move is the ol’ POV switcheroo: making you think a character is narrating, only to later reveal it’s been someone else all along. Sometimes that works. In this book… it mostly confused me. (I’m looking at you, “Abby’s therapy” chapters that turned out to be Kitty talking about Charles. 🙃)

All that said: the premise is great, the setting is eerie, and Feeney still writes relationships in such a nuanced way that you find yourself weirdly empathizing with everyone — even when someone’s clearly on their way to becoming compost. 🪦😂

But this twist? Whew. Let’s unpack.

---

📝 SPOILER-FILLED PLOT SUMMARY

(You’ve been warned — abandon ship now if you don’t want spoilers ⛔)

---

📍 Overview

Beautiful Ugly (2025, Flatiron Books) is a psychological thriller told in dual first-person POVs: Grady Green, a novelist, and his missing wife Abby Goldman, who disappeared a year earlier. The story unfolds between London and the fictional, creepy little Isle of Amberly in the Scottish Highlands.

---

📅 The Disappearance

We open in London. Grady’s celebrating becoming a New York Times bestselling author 📚🎉 when his wife Abby calls. She’s driving home from work, says she’s “close,” then suddenly stops her car on a cliff road because there’s a “body in the street.” She gets out to check… and vanishes. The call stays connected. Grady runs outside. She’s gone. 👻

---

✍️ Writer’s Block + Escape to Amberly

A year later, Grady is a mess — can’t write, can’t sleep, can’t move on. His agent (and Abby’s godmother), Kitty, suggests he hole up in a cabin on Amberly she inherited from famous author Charles Whittaker. Grady, desperate for inspiration, goes.

On the ferry, he meets Sandy, who tells him he can’t bring his car. He sees a woman who looks suspiciously like Abby. When he arrives, Sandy drives him to the cabin. It’s rustic, remote, and — because this is an Alice Feeney novel — unsettling. 🌲⛈️

---

🕯️ Weird Happenings

• Grady finds an unpublished manuscript by Charles and promptly steals the idea for his own book. 🙃

• He keeps seeing women who look like Abby.

• Strange envelopes appear under his door containing old newspaper clippings about Abby.

• The locals treat him strangely.

• He drinks a lot. (Classic isolated-writer-on-a-creepy-island move.) 🥃

---

🧠 Abby… or Aubrey?

One night, Grady drives and accidentally hits a woman who looks just like Abby. Shock: it is Abby. Except she now goes by Aubrey Fairlight, is married to a woman named Travers, and has a baby named Holly. 🍼

She claims she doesn’t remember him. But plot twist: she actually does. She grew up on Amberly, returned there after Grady tried to kill her, and hid her identity to build a new life. 😬

---

🕳️ The Truth About That Night

On the night Abby disappeared, the “body” in the road? Yeah. That was Grady. He staged his own death scene to trick her. When she got out to help, he threw her off the cliff. She survived, pregnant, and went into hiding. (Also, she’d secretly undergone IVF because she wanted kids and Grady didn’t.)

Kitty, Sandy, and Abby confront Grady and tell him he’s not leaving the island. He’s going to atone by becoming their resident author and giving all his book profits to the Amberly Island Trust so they don’t have to sell to tourists. Grady reluctantly agrees. ✍️🏝️

---

⚰️ That Ending

A year later, Grady seems weirdly happy. He’s writing, living on the island, thinking about Abby fondly. Then he goes to bed… and wakes up inside a coffin. 😵

Turns out, this was the islanders’ real endgame: bury Grady alive, his biggest fear. The oxygen runs out. Game over. 😶‍🌫️

---

🧩 The Secret Code

One clever detail: if you take the first word of every chapter for the first 14 chapters, it spells:

“If you are reading this I am trapped on the island, please help me.”

Kitty figured it out — and that’s why Grady had to die. 🔐📖

---

🤯 Final Thoughts

There’s a lot here that I liked:

• The isolated island setting

• The tight cast (no endless red herrings 👏)

• The creepy code 👀

• The satisfying karmic ending ⚰️

But honestly? I’m starting to see Alice Feeney’s tricks coming from a mile away. The unreliable narrator shtick is starting to wear thin for me. The Grady twist—him being the body—wasn’t just unexpected; it felt impossible based on the info we were given. Like, he was supposedly holding the phone to his ear the whole time… how? 🧐

⭐ Rating: 3/5 — A solid, atmospheric thriller with some great moments, but it tested my patience more than thrilled me.

---

📚 If You Liked Beautiful Ugly, Try These:

• 🧠 Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney — the twist that started it all.

• 🌊 Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney — locked-room mystery on an island, with a ghostly twist.

• 🏡 Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris — psychological thriller meets domestic horror.

• 🔪 The Housemaid by Freida McFadden — unreliable narrators galore, but fun.