Book Notes: Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

This is a pretty standard women’s mystery, and as all novels in the genre, this book aims at looking at some anxiety-inducing issue that matters to women. The mystery itself is of middling quality but that’s beyond the point. Such books are playpens of sorts where women can explore things that worry them.

Beautiful Ugly explores one of the most worrisome concerns for women, which is what happens if they are prevented from having children. Most crucially, what if they are prevented from it by their husbands? The husband is a figure that provides income and the sense of being desired. This makes him centrally important. But what if he at the same time won’t let you have children? Beautiful Ugly imaginatively punishes such a husband and tries to offer a scenario where his good qualities can be retained and the bad ones are exorcised.

This is a British novel, and these days it means that there will be two kinds of scarcity dominating such a book. A scarcity of housing and a scarcity of children. This novel has both. It’s entertaining and it makes an unwitting mockery of what feminism has become.