Beautiful Ugly | Alice Feeney (spoilers and ending explained)

Alice Feeney has done it again! I feel like I’ve been gaslighted in the best possible way when I read her books. As a preface before I get into it, if you like audiobooks I thought that Richard Armitage knocked it out of the park for this book. Dark, moody, atmospheric! So what was that blindside that has had everyone in the book world talking? Let’s talk about it.

How does it open?

It starts with a bang! A writer named Grady Green is waiting to hear if his new book made the New York Times bestseller list. His wife is on her way but he is frankly a bit salty she isn’t there yet. He calls to see where she is and she slams on the breaks. She’s seen a woman lying in the road. Despite Grady’s protestations to stay in her car, she goes to help. And then with a scream, the line goes silent. Grady rushes to her car and finds it left running in the middle of the road with no sign of his wife. Where is Abby?

One year later, has Abby been found?

No! Grady is buried deep in grief. He has essentially stopped living his life, he has spent all his money, and he hasn’t written a word on his new book. His agent Kitty (who is also Abby’s godmother) is the only person who seems to understand. She misses Abby too. Kitty has an idea though… One of her other writers—a famous author named Charles Whittaker—left her a cabin on a small island in the Scottish Highlands. No one ever knew what happened to him, but he stopped publishing several years ago (a bit ominous if you ask me, but then again writers can be a reclusive bunch. Remember J.D. Salinger? No one saw him for fifty years). Kitty suggests that Grady go to use the cabin and write. It always worked for Charles, after all. Perhaps this is the lifeline Grady needs (it’s at least better than living in a sad hotel broke and with no friends, amirite?).

What happens when Grady gets to the island?

So…the island is a bit weird. It’s small—only 25 residents. The woman who drives the ferry to the island, Sandy, tells him they don’t allow visitors outside of a few months per year. Grady has a place to stay though, so she lets him board the ferry. But he can’t bring his car! Apparently, visitors aren’t allowed to have cars. There is also no telephone or internet on the island. And the ferry apparently doesn’t have a schedule, so Grady has no way of knowing if and when he can get back to shore if he needs to. Strange… 

(I loved the island. I loved the description. It sounded beautiful but eerie!)

While settling in at the cabin, Grady’s dog uncovers a hidden space beneath the floor that contains… a bundle of papers and the bones of a human hand (Yikes!!!). He leaves the hand on a velvet cushion (lol) and sits down with the papers. It’s a manuscript! And not just any manuscript, this is the unpublished and famous ‘Book 10’ that was alleged to be Charles Whittaker’s best work before he disappeared. 

I think we can all guess what Grady does with that manuscript that no one else has read… he takes it. He rewrites it as his own book. He packages that book right up and sends it off on the ferry! But are we certain no one else read the manuscript? Sandy was always his first reader. Could Charles have given the manuscript to Sandy before he died?

What are the clues that something isn’t quite right?

Do you mean besides the island with only 25 residents and no telephones, internet, or ways to get on and off the island? Do you mean the literal human hand he found? If that wasn’t enough, let’s talk through the other clues. 

One week before her disappearance Abby is talking to a therapist, and she gives a very different view of marriage than what we hear from Grady. Who is lying though? Abby portrays her husband as distant, selfish, and at times verging on cruel. Grady portrays his marriage as wonderful, despite some issues that all couples face. Hmm… Abby also admits that she has been lying to her husband. She tells an absolutely heart breaking story about a sexual assault by her piano teacher as a child. She also tells a shocking story about how she met her husband on a plane and he got up to some business beneath the blankets overnight. Ok…

(At this point I was super suspicious of what was going on with that version of the story, but we’ll get to that.)

Grady keeps seeing a woman in a red coat that he thinks is Abby (she disappeared wearing a red coat). When he tries to find her, it always appears to be someone else. But then Abby calls him from a telephone booth (are you wondering where she found a telephone booth?). By this point, it’s impossible to trust Grady’s version of anything. He is spiraling in grief and confusion. He even meets a woman he is convinced is Abby. They look identical though their eyes are different. She runs a pottery shop on the island that she calls Beautiful Ugly. That was actually what Grady had named his manuscript. Hmm…

(I kept bringing up The Wicker Man in my book chat because this book had major vibes that reminded me of that movie. If you’ve seen it and then read this book, you’ll know exactly what I mean!)

Grady learns that there actually was a dead body found on the island a year earlier. The man’s body washed up on shore after a visitor had come to the island. Hmm… There is a stunningly beautiful reverend on the island. There are no birds anywhere. Someone keeps sliding clipped news stories under his door that were all written by Abby. Everyone he meets on the island wears these silver rings with thistles on them. He also learns that a group of children died on the island years ago after the negligence of their substitute teacher. 

What is really going on?

Grady goes to find Sandy and ask if she read the manuscript. He finds her up by a cave where the children all died that day. One of the children who died was her daughter, and she is there to grieve. She also admits that she had read the manuscript. Grady leaves but runs out of gas on his way back to the cabin. Oh, and Grady receives a letter from Kitty telling him she can’t reach him but he needs to leave the island (Eek!).

While trying to find a way off the island, Grady stops to talk to Cora at the local shop and learns that the man who died the year before on the island was also an author (Get off the island, Grady!). But Grady can’t leave the island because Sandy is dead (What?!) and no one else can drive the ferry.

Now Grady is in a pickle… Unsure of what else to do, Grady fiddles with the frequency of the walkie talkie he has and overhears a conversation between the women on the island. They are all talking about him. They are clearly conspiring behind his back, but why? Grady is out of gas and Cora nearly taunts him saying there are no gas stations on the island. His cell phone rings and it says the caller is his wife, but when he answers he can only hear the sea. Is Grady going mad? (I mean, he’s certainly not in peak mental health…)

 He goes to the church and enters to find all of the women on the island (this is a bad idea but he is so broken at this point, I get it). The women accuse him of leaving Sandy to drown in the cave when she told him about her daughter and the dead children (He did). But that’s not his only crime (we’ll get to that in a moment). Grady realizes there are no men on the island. They tell him it’s because of the substitute teacher (a man) and that over time they just replaced any vacancies with women. (The Wicker Man!)

Anyway, Sandy is alive after all and in the church. She also tells him she knows Grady stole Charles’s novel and left her to die so that no one would know. Then the church doors open and guess who it is? Abby! It turns out the woman at the pottery shop was indeed Abby. She’s still alive! How can it be? 

What really happened to Abby?

Abby was driving home to celebrate the news of his bestseller and on the phone with Grady when she stopped for a person wearing a red jacket lying in the road. It turns out that was Grady, luring her out of her vehicle and then pushing her off the cliff. (Grady was trying to kill her???) He was upset because he found out she was pregnant. Since he has had a vasectomy, he knew the child wasn’t his and Abby must be having an affair. Abby didn’t die, though, but she certainly realized she can’t return back home. She ditches the jacket so he thinks she died and fled back to the island where she grew up (obviously it is this island).

Abby was the only child to survive the day the other kids drowned. She tells Grady that the substitute teacher came to her house that day and we can infer from the story that he assaulted her. She fled afterwards to the cave and brought the other children with her. The sea started coming in and they all drowned. Except Abby. She was sent off the island to London to live with her godmother, Kitty. Still, something doesn’t quite make sense about her story… She can’t be the woman from the other narrative, the details don’t line up.

Who is the other narrator?

Many of the chapters are narrated by someone else that isn’t Abby. This is a tiny bit of a reach because her name is actually Abby, but she isn’t Grady’s Abby. And the writer she was married to isn’t Grady. So, who is she? It turns out to be… 

Kitty! Her real name is Abby though she changed it long ago after she left her husband, who happens to be… Charles Whitakker. He wasn’t a good husband, though he was a great writer thanks in some part to Kitty. Their marriage was great until it wasn’t. She was talking to a counselor (the hot reverend!) about leaving him. Kitty was the girl assaulted by her piano teacher (he later became the substitute teacher who assaulted Abby). Her mother chopped off his hand with an axe (the hand under the floorboards!). After Abby’s mother died, Kitty took Abby to London with her.

How does Beautiful Ugly end?

Kitty shows up on the island and reveals her backstory to Grady. Charles had been living on the island after Kitty left him. He wrote on the island and donated a large part of his earnings to keep it running. But then he realized that they were getting rid of all the men. He refused to write anymore. 

Kitty didn’t know what happened to Abby until a few months after she went missing. Grady thought she was cheating because she was pregnant, but she actually got pregnant through IVF and was scared to tell him. Grady didn’t want children. Abby came to the island to have her baby and eventually asked Kitty to come back. Kitty decided to destroy Grady for what he tried to do to Abby.

Kitty was frustrated that Charles never gave her the tenth manuscript. The island needed Charles and the earnings he brought in, but he wasn’t able to write anymore. Eventually, he took his own life. The women tried to bring another writer to the island to produce books but it didn’t work out. He was the dead body that washed up. After what happened to Abby, Kitty realized that Grady might be the perfect writer to bring and take over where Charles left off.

She offers a deal: Grady can stay and live on the island and write with the proceeds going to the island, or they will kill him. (Not much of a decision, if you ask me…)

One year later, Grady is still on the island and his book is indeed a bestseller. However, he hid a secret message in his book to his readers asking them to rescue him. Before that can happen, he is drugged and wakes up in a coffin. His greatest fear is being buried alive. A walkie talkie is in the coffin and he hears Abby’s voice just before he dies… “I hope you die in your sleep.” This was the phrase Abby and Grady used to say “I love you.” It’s the last he hears.

What did I think?

I loved the similarities to The Wicker Man. There were plenty of unique elements that made it twisty and fun. The premise of an island of women who lure one man there and he is struggling to figure out what is going on… brilliant. In this version, the man has a reason he finds himself in this state. The reveal that it was Grady lying on the road the note Abby disappeared was a total stunner. I was shook! I did have to suspend disbelief a bit because are we thinking he was laying on the road talking to her? Could she not hear the rain through the phone? It doesn’t matter, it was still a great twist.

I was pretty sure that Abby in the other narrative must be different from Abby in Grady’s narrative, but I really had no clue how. My theory was that Abby was married before Grady and perhaps that was the marriage she was describing. But it turns out that until Grady tried to kill her, they actually had a wonderful marriage. She really loved him. Now, I don’t agree with Grady killing her, but can we at least agree that it was a bit dodgy of her to do IVF and get pregnant and never tell him? I can see why he thought she cheated. That would make more sense, right? That’s not a great reason to kill your wife, though. Grady might have tried talking to her first. But that is not this story.

Kitty is wild. Wild! She is absolutely the most unhinged in the book. Her tragic backstory helps the reader empathize with her though. She had some sadness. Abby did too, but she found Grady and they were happy (until they weren’t). Charles as portrayed through Kitty’s eyes was fascinating but also kind of a creep. I won’t rehash the plane scene but… I think readers will know what I’m referring to.

The ending was so dark! I loved it.

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