Great Big Beautiful Life

4.75 BUT here’s the thing.

If I’m rating this as an Emily Henry romance book? It’s a 3.5 at best.
Good but not great and I’d only recommend it if someone was already saying they were going to read it. It doesn’t have the usual Emily hooks and banter of her previous romance books. It doesn’t have me instantly falling in love with the couple. It doesn’t have them starting off as lighthearted friends sliding into something more serious and realistic.

Instead, this book starts out stark and realistic. Sure, the main character tries to be positive and is a people pleaser, always smiling and chipper, but from the very beginning there’s a darkness, a sadness to her.

And, honestly, in the beginning I hated the MMC. I didn’t show more like the weird tension that moved to fast but also not really. Their story was whatever but I was obsessed with the old lady’s character and life story.

But then you learn to love the dual stories. You learn to love the budding romance, the suspense, the intensity then “wait, we can’t” as they get to know each other better. And the old lady storyline just kept getting better! And all the closure at the end? Swoon/cry.

So I let go of my expectations of what I thought Emily Henry should be and what she should write… and with that, it was an incredible book. show less

Alice Scott travels to a small island in Georgia ready for the job of a lifetime: to interview and ghost write the biography of one Margaret Ives, a reclusive woman who's early life was documented by tabloids and whose love story was the stuff of legends. The only catch? Hayden Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is also in the running for the job. And Margaret agrees to give them each a month to make the case for who should write the book.

The story is told in Alice's first-person narration and goes back and forth between her and Hayden's budding romance and Margaret's interviews, revealing and concealing parts of her past as Alice attempts to gain her trust and get the job. We not only see Alice get to know Margaret and show more Hayden, but also glimpse Alice's own family dynamics and why this job is so important to her. I was fully invested in both stories, and enjoyed the revelations - some surprising, some inevitable, but all clicking into place to make a satisfying whole. show less

Alice Scott is an optimistic, relentlessly warm journalist who has tracked down a tip that Margaret Ives — the "Tabloid Princess," tragic heiress to one of the most scandalous media dynasties of the 20th century, who vanished from public life decades ago — is living quietly under a false name on Little Crescent Island, a sleepy Georgia coastal town. Alice calls her. Margaret invites her down. Alice arrives ready to pitch the biography of her dreams, only to discover that Margaret has also invited Hayden Anderson — a gruff, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and certified human thundercloud — for the same opportunity. Margaret will spend a month speaking with both of them separately, then choose who gets to tell her story.
Alice is show more sunny and people-smart and genuinely likes Margaret immediately. Hayden is closed off, reserved, a grumpy counterweight to Alice's warmth, and they clash professionally from the start while very slowly, inevitably, falling into each other's orbit. But Margaret's story is the real engine of the novel — as she unspools her past across their interview sessions, the full sweep of the Ives family emerges: a media patriarch who built an empire from nothing, generations of scandal and secrecy, deaths blamed on the relentless paparazzi, illegitimate children hidden and renamed. Henry cites the Kennedy family, the Hearsts, the Murdochs, and Taylor Swift's song "The Last Great American Dynasty" as inspirations. The romance is a grumpy-sunshine slow burn, but Margaret's saga is the heart.

[May contain spoilers]
The twist that lands hardest: Hayden is Margaret's grandson. His mother was the daughter Margaret had with her great love Cosmo — a baby she gave up for adoption after Cosmo was killed in a paparazzi-caused crash, not wanting her child to live under the same surveillance that had destroyed her own life and taken the person she loved most. Hayden grew up not knowing his family medical history or where he came from, which has been a source of ongoing anxiety. The entire competition setup — Alice and Hayden competing for the biography — turns out to be a deliberate arrangement by Margaret, who knew who Hayden was and engineered their arrival together. Margaret's housekeeper Jodi is revealed to be her niece. The ending is hopeful, with Alice and Hayden together and the family secrets finally aired.
What I think: This is Emily Henry being more ambitious than usual — it's less straight rom-com and more family saga with romance woven through, closer in spirit to the kind of sweeping heiress-with-secrets story that The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo popularized. Margaret is genuinely compelling; the romance is slower to ignite than Henry's usual work and Hayden is more reserved than her typical male leads. The twist is genuinely good. Whether Margaret's story or Alice and Hayden's chemistry lands depends entirely on your mood going in. Probably a 3.5 to 4 from you — the concept is strong but the execution is slightly uneven. show less

Alice has travelled to an island off the coast of Georgia to meet an elderly woman about whom Alice wants to write a biography – Margaret Ives, the last member of a prominent media family. But Margaret is also considering working with another journalist and wants to give both of them a month-long trial.

I really enjoyed the present-day story about Alice, her conversations with Margaret and her interactions with Hayden:

”Then where’d you grow up?” I ask
“Indiana,” he says.
“Did you like it?” I ask.
His brow sinks into a scowl, his wide mouth still keeping an utterly straight line. “Why?”
I laugh. “What do you mean why?”
“Why would you want to know if I liked growing up in Indiana?” he says, face and voice perfectly

show more

matched in surliness.
I fight a smile. “Because I'm considering buying it.”
His eyes narrow, irises seeming to darken. “Buying what?”
“Indiana,” I say.
He stares.
I can't fight it anymore. The amusement wins out, and a laugh escapes me. “I'm just trying to get to know you,” I explain.

But every so often there is a chapter of “The Story”, a third person account of the history of Ives family, and there’s something quite bleak about that. I got about two-thirds through and began feeling increasingly unenthusiastic about reading further.

I don’t read biographies very often and “The Story” in Great Big Beautiful Life got me thinking about why that is. I often feel sad seeing this zoomed-out view of life, in which aspects of one’s life can be perceived as a loss, or as failure, because in the summary the actual experience becomes overshadowed by the way that experience ends – either because those endings are where the drama are, or else because the story is told with foreknowledge of said ending. But that’s not the way life is lived! Life is lived in the moment.

I’m not arguing that the zoomed-out view of life is inherently, objectively, sad – maybe it is all just to do with my mindset.

Anyway, I took a break from Great Big Beautiful Life (and then my library loan expired) and when I returned to the story nearly a month later, I was honestly motivated far more by wanting to “tidy up” the loose thread of an unfinished book than curiosity about what happened next!

But I’m really glad I persevered, because it was worth it! The story of the Ives family was still not particularly happy, but as it went on, as I developed a better understanding of the purpose of telling this not-particularly-happy story, I found myself appreciating it more.

There was satisfaction in uncovering a mystery, but also in seeing what Alice has gained from this experience of diving into another family’s history. I loved how Alice’s own experience of family becomes more of a focus.

The ending was unexpectedly moving.

I’m not sure if I’d say go as far as to say I liked this book more than Henry’s others – in some ways I liked it more and in other ways I liked it less – but I think it might be her best? show less

"It was brief and it was beautiful"
**Spoiler-free review ** So it's been about 15 hours since I finished GBBL, and I think I'm ready to word vomit some thoughts. I think GBBL is Emily Henry's first true women's literary fiction book and reads as such. If you go in with that mindset, I think you won't be disappointed when the romance isn't as grand as in her other novels. Yes, it is very reminiscent of TJR's Evelyn Hugo, but one of them does it better... I'll get to that later. Alice and Hayden are a decent match, but for ✨ME✨ I was more interested in Margaret's story than I was in their romance. Overall, GBBL was good. Was it my favorite Emily Henry novel? Not by a long shot. Is it my least favorite of hers? Again, no. It was a show more solid book where I was more focused on the secondary characters' lives and relationships than I was on the main character's romance. EmHen's writing is captivating as always, and I think even if this is your least favorite story from her, the writing will still be such a treat, you'll stay for the prose.. Overall, this is a solid 4-star read.

SPOILERS INCOMING
10...
9....
8...
7....
654
3...
2...
1...


Alice is a fine MC. Her optimism and way of viewing the world is admirable. I, too, get frustrated with her relationship with her mom, but I get it. I feel like her trauma surrounding her sister's illness was kind of dropped and never truly explored. She wakes up during the fire alarm with concern for Audrey, something bad must've happened, but then it's kind of forgotten for a bit. It would've been nice if we could've had a moment with Audrey and Alice to talk about how Audrey's illness as a kid affected Alice as an adult, but we only have so many pages, so that never happened.

I really liked the exploration of Alice and her mother's relationship, especially in the wake of her father's death. I just wish that after they have the heart-to-heart, we had maybe one more scene with their fleshed-out healing journey, but again, we only have so much time and so many pages.

Now to Alice & Hayden. Let's be honest here, their romance does read as an afterthought. They had a nice build-up. Their banter was nice, but I never truly felt they were competing writers or rivals. Hayden was a little cold to Alice in the beginning, but there was never this overwhelming sense of them competing, which is a letdown when you're expecting rivals to lovers. Then seemingly out of nowhere, Alice is falling in love™️ with Hayden, and I'm utterly confused. When, where, and how did we get here? Yeah, they had crushes on each other and were physically attracted to one another, but it felt like a leap for Alice to be falling for Hayden. Hayden saying I love you to Alice wasn't deserved. Their ending was nice. Even Hayden received the letter from Margaret and cared more about Alice's love confession (even though I thought this was unspoken between them... which can I say... I hated? Hayden gets to say "I love you." "Hayden gets to be affectionate." "Hayden holds all the cards." Because he got burned once? BOOOOOOO. They're cute together, so I'll forgive this one thing, this one time.) It was sweet, and I like the way EmHen wrote their daughter into the book, but this doesn't negate the fact that their big moments didn't feel earned because they weren't the main focus of this story. The man in focus is and was

Margaret's story. I loved Evelyn Hugo something fierce, so I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed Margaret's story far more than Alice's. The thing that TJR did (and excelled at) & that EmHen fell short at, was two competing stories. For Evelyn Hugo, Monique took a backseat to anything outside of the interview & her story played into Evelyn's; all the dots are connected. For Alice & Margaret, Alice is a bystander, a wrench in Margaret getting to know her grandson. Alice's story eventually intertwines with Margaret's, and that's only because she fell in love with her grandson. Now, if the reverse were true and Alice were the granddaughter, things would be a hell of a lot different.

Aside from what didn't work, Margaret's family story was compelling, and I love the story of pulling back the curtain on the rich and famous. Just because they have the world at their fingertips doesn't erase that, at the end of the day, they're just human. They have the same wants, needs, and desires as us. I think EmHen does this really well with each facet of the Ives family history, and I like where it ends. The little mystery with the doctor & Nicollet was fun and had me hooked. I would take an entire literary fiction novel based solely on the Ives family. I'd devour that.

All in all, I liked this book. Do I think that it was the best that it could've been? Well, no. I enjoyed it nonetheless. I think if Emily Henry ever DOES decide to go full send on literary fiction, it has the potential to be (another one) one of my all-time fav reads. Her writing style is captivating, and I think it would lend itself well; she just has to decide to do it. show less

Alice Scott is on the verge of her big break as a journalist and writer. After months of digging, she's tracked down Margaret Ives, the former media darling and only living member of the influential American family who had influence in both newspapers and Hollywood for much of the last century. Alice arrives on small, tourist-focused Crescent Island in Georgia anticipating making a pitch on being the author to help Margaret craft her memoir. However, to Alice's surprise, she's not the only writer Margaret is speaking to and that Hayden Anderson, who just won a Pulitzer for his last book, is also in the running to help Margaret write her book. Margaret makes a deal with Alice and Hayden: meet with her separately for the next month and at show more the end of that time, Margaret will choose the writer she wants to help her. As Alice begins talking with Margaret, it's clear that there are things the woman is holding back, even as Alice learns more about what it was like for Margaret growing up as an Ives. At the same time, being in the same small community means that Alice and Hayden keep bumping into each other and despite her initial impression of Hayden as one of the grumpiest men she's ever met, the more time they spend together, the faster she finds herself falling for him.

Emily Henry stretches the boundaries of romance with her latest novel. While there is still a charming as all get out grumpy and sunshine, rivals to lovers plotline happening between Alice and Hayden, that's filled with lots of excellent banter, there is also a family saga plot as well in the chapters when Alice interviews Margaret. Both plots are equally compelling as we dive in to the history that made Margaret's family famous and then eventually pushed her to become a recluse. At the same time, Alice's character is also explored and it is thoroughly rewarding as a reader to watch her confront her life experiences and grow as a human being. Another excellent read from Emily Henry that I highly recommend. show less

I hadn’t planned to read the new Emily Henry novel so quickly on release, but a line on social media caught my eye. The person mentioned that the romance was in the background and this sounded quite intriguing to me, given that Henry’s books have been primarily romance based to date. While I don’t think that the romance is completely in the background, it’s complemented by a historical mystery which I really enjoyed. Think a splash of a Taylor Jenkins Reid novel with the complexity of fame and family, but with Henry’s own twists.

The story is told in the first person perspective by Alice, a journalist. She’s received a tipoff that the reclusive heiress Margaret Ives is living under an assumed name in Georgia. To interview show more her would be the scoop of her life, so she tracks Margaret down, and eventually Margaret agrees to meet Alice. But there’s a catch – yes, Margaret is willing to tell her story for a biography, but there’s another writer involved. Enter Hayden, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. They have a month to interview Margaret and come up with a plan for the biography, then she will choose one of them to write the rest. At first, Alice is not a fan of Hayden. He’s quiet, reserved and very focused. But they become friends, discussing every topic but Margaret, before falling for each other. It’s difficult given each of their personal baggage, and the NDAs they have signed but it could be something big. Interspersed with their story is Margaret’s story – what the tabloids said happened versus what Margaret says. But is Margaret telling the whole truth about the money, the fame, the cult, the trial and the accident?

I enjoyed Alice and Hayden’s story – it’s sweet, realistic with more than a few bumps and grows as Alice goes through her own hurts. But I was completely invested in Margaret’s story as it was wild. So much went on with her family in the quest for money and love with multiple tragic events. I would have happily read just Margaret’s story. I felt it fitted in well with Alice’s story, as it’s told while Alice interviews her. The story is also set on an island in summer, so it has those vacation vibes too as well as a modern day mystery for Hayden and Alice to solve. (The sweet thing being that they couldn’t solve it alone – they had to work together).

The story has the trademark Emily Henry sparkle – the summer vibes of You and Me on Vacation, the bookish parts of Book Lovers and the early competition of Beach Read – and none of the character traits I found boring in Funny Story. The pacing is good and the story is balanced between history, romance, family drama and summer fun. Yes, it’s a different direction for Henry and it’s not a straight romance but it works perfectly well to create a captivating story.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less