“I intend to put up with nothing I can put down.”
Edgar Allen Poe
I’m going to be totally honest with you—I couldn’t finish Bridget Foley’s Hugo & Rose. When picking up a book is a chore, that’s a huge signal for me that the book and I aren’t a good fit.
Things started off so promisingly. I came across a used copy of Hugo & Rose at a Goodwill Bookstore and the cover caught my eye. You have to admit that it’s gorgeous. The blurb intrigued me, too. It describes a plot in which Rose, a thirty-something wife and mother, is disappointed with her life, but she has dreamt every night since the age of six of a fantastical island and the same boy—Hugo. When she runs across Hugo in real life, they set out to discover the secret of their connection. That sounds fun and interesting, right?
Wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.
(Heads up: There are going to be some spoilers here for the first half of the book. I didn’t get to the ending so I can’t spoil that for you.)
I have seldom found a book so alarmingly depressing. Rose started having dreams of Hugo after she went into a coma after a bicycle accident when she was six. She grows up, marries a man who absolutely adores her, and has three beautiful children. But her husband works a lot and Rose has gotten heavy, so she feels like her whole life is a terrible disappointment. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that clinical depression is a very real thing and I take it seriously. But Foley writes Rose so unsympathetically. She has a therapist but lies to her. She refuses medication and so she “talks herself better.” Sorry, but when you’re as severely depressed as Rose seemed to be, “talking yourself better” isn’t a thing. Either Rose is chemically depressed and she needs medication, or she’s being a big whiny baby about her (extremely) first-world problems. It’s one or the other.
One day, when Rose is taking her kids to a soccer game (horror of horrors), she comes across a man who looks like the Hugo from her dreams. She becomes obsessed with this guy. She leaves her youngest child, a toddler, with a babysitter so she can drive an hour away each day to stalk the guy. When the babysitter isn’t available, Rose just takes her daughter in the car and lets the (again, VERY young child) live in her car seat, distracted by her tablet and eating fast food. All so Rose can follow this man who doesn’t know she exists.
The whole idea made me feel very uncomfortable—almost physically ill. I’m not usually squeamish, but the thought that Rose was ignoring the actual important things in her life so she can stalk someone just gave me the creeps.
Of course, eventually Rose introduces herself and, sure enough, it’s actually the Hugo from her dreams. He turns out to be way underwhelming, but they’re so thrilled to have found each other. I started to have some hope for this book, but then it got weird. For some reason, Hugo and Rose, who are both way more attractive in their shared dreams, never got together in their dreams. Like, in their thirty-plus years of dreaming together, they never kissed or anything in their dreams. Until, that is, Hugo discovers that Rose is an actual person. Once he knows she has a husband and children, that’s when he decides to kiss her in one of their dreams. And suddenly Rose is lusting after this guy who is now very real and very much not her husband.
I hated every second of it. I could see if they’d been romantic in their dreams beforehand. I think most people have dreams like that. It’s the fact that there was no romance until it was real, until it was forbidden, that makes me mad. I get that book characters are supposed to be flawed, but it made them both so unlikeable. I couldn’t get past it.
And so ends my journey with Hugo and Rose. I have no idea how the book ends, and basically this blog post is just my scream into the void about how much this book bugged me. But I really needed to get it out.
Happy Reading (something other than Hugo & Rose)!
