Posted by
Lara
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/great-big-beautiful-life-by-emily-henry/
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?post_type=reviews&p=142660
A
Great Big Beautiful Life
by Emily Henry
April 22, 2025 · Berkley
TW/CW
CW: So many tragic events are described in this book. They all happen historically but in the telling, their force is felt. These include multiple deaths, estrangements, adoptions and a cult. It’s intense.
Ed.note: I typically call these “grief books” and Lara confirms that’s an apt description.
I dithered for a week before starting this book. I had it in my possession, but couldn’t get past the first page. I’m not sure if this is unique to me, but when I’m really looking forward to something, it’s very difficult for me to start it. Then, one morning I bit the bullet and pushed through to page two. From there, I tore through the book, snatching reading time wherever I could until I finished it this evening.
Afterward, I think I felt every emotion there is to feel.
Alice and Hayden are writers who are in a small town in coastal Georgia to try out for the post of being Margaret Ives’ biographer. Margaret Ives now lives a reclusive life under a different name and works as a mosaic artist in said coastal town. She’s in her 80s and has lived an incredibly big life, much of it played out in the tabloids. She comes from a very wealthy media mogul family and she quickly became the ‘Tabloid Princess’. Now she is ready to tell her story, her way.
Margaret’s story takes up a big chunk of the book and it is an incredibly tragic one. A romance novel promises only a HEA for our main couple. There’s no promise for a HEA for her so I felt I was risking my heart a bit reading this book. The suffering in Margaret’s life made it tough going for me. I was very worried about what would happen to Margaret at the end. If, like me, you can only go through emotional turmoil in a book if you know that things will at least kind of work out, then click below to see whether it’s a HEA or not for Margaret.
Ending spoiler, but vague about the particulars
It’s sort of an HEA for Margaret, albeit with no romance involved. Not as happy as our main couple, but at least not more tragedy.
Alice focuses on celebrity profiles mostly and other lighter pieces. This would be her first major biography, but she’s passionate about telling it because her dad (who passes away before the book begins) was curious about Margaret’s story. Losing her dad is not the only tragic event of Alice’s life. Her sister had health issues when she was younger and that deeply impacted Alice’s life. There’s also some baggage with her mom. So Alice has a lot going on. All of this is unpacked gradually for the reader, but the bare bones (like I’ve given you here) emerge early on in the book.
At the very start of the book, though, Alice is SUNSHINE PERSONIFIED and at the exact moment I had the thought, ‘She is irritating’, the backstory begins to be revealed and the depth to her personality emerges.
If Alice is sunshine, then Hayden is the grump (although these are such fully fleshed out characters that it feels odd to reduce them to a trope). He’s a taciturn journalist who started out writing about music and then won a Pulitzer when he wrote a biography about someone just as they were losing their memories to dementia. He is initially quite cold with Alice, but that changes, almost against his will.
It’s not that Alice charms him or that he warms up. It’s a bit of both, but it’s also more than that. There is a magnetism between these two that compels them into each other’s path. The repartee had me smiling at my Kindle like a goofball. There are some moments of humour too! These combine to really lift the book into something that’s readable for someone like me who takes ages to recover from books describing tragedies.
Alice and Hayden gradually fall in love and it’s phenomenal to read. The depth, the nuance, the insight. I felt like I knew these people as well as I know my friends. They’re thrown together initially because the first meeting they have with Margaret is a joint one where they find out the terms of this ‘audition’ to be her biographer. They’ll spend a month with Margaret (separately, on alternate days) and once the month is up, each writer must put together a proposal of how they would approach the book.
This coastal town is a tiny one, so they cross each other’s paths multiple times during that month, sometimes accidentally (neighbouring hotel rooms initially) and sometimes purposefully (Alice will sometimes seek Hayden out, wanting to be friends with him because she makes friends with everyone). The transition from competitors to friends to lovers is so gradual that I can’t identify a turning point in their relationship. There is a slow slide that as a reader I just sunk into like one would a hot bath. There is however a steady build in the tension. They both want this job and one of them is going to lose out in the end. What impact will that have on their budding relationship? As a source of conflict, it does the job.
Looking at it more broadly, the characterisation and the deftness of the writing itself is what compelled me to read this book in a day. When I would take breaks to feed my daughter or get the breast pump out, my real life would feel strange and even foreign to me, such was the extent of my immersion in this book. The end of the book was incredibly fast paced as loose ends were wrapped up and at that stage I was helpless and just went where the book told me to go.
I loved this novel. As much as it put me through the emotional wringer, the quality of the writing forced me to keep reading it and I am so very glad that I did. I think the one caution I would add is that this is more women’s fiction than it is contemporary romance. Regardless of genre specifics, Great Big Beautiful Life echoed for days after I finished it. I’m not sure I’ll ever revisit it, but I will certainly remember it.
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/great-big-beautiful-life-by-emily-henry/
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?post_type=reviews&p=142660
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