Spoilers ahead
With a title like “Great Big Beautiful Life,” I expected fireworks coming into this book, but was disappointed when I got only a few sparks.
Emily Henry is a current staple of the romance novel world, with her bibliography containing multiple #1 bestsellers and Goodreads Choice Award winners. Her latest book, “Great Big Beautiful Life,” was a long-awaited read by many, myself included. Sadly, this book left a lot to be desired.
The main premise of “The Great Big Beautiful Life” revolves around the main character, Alice, reporting on and trying to tell the life story of the eccentric Margaret Ives. Alice and Hayden are reporters for different companies competing to be chosen by Margaret to write her story. Margaret is the last living member of the Ives family, a prolific multi-million dollar family, who amassed most of their fortune on a monopoly of several newspapers. She has a hidden past rooted in family death, betrayal and even a mysterious cult involving Margaret’s sister.
The mystery aspect of the novel left a lot to be desired. Toward the end of the book, when a plot twist is revealed between two characters, I was thrown off guard. Not because it was a surprising and gripping reveal, but because it made no sense and felt much more like a plot point tacked on at the end. It didn’t really add much substance to the story, since we hardly saw the two characters the twist revolved around interact with each other.
Throughout the book, Alice often feels more like a plot device than a character. A story which, while interesting, felt a lot more like the breakdown of a family tree. Spending entire chapters on great-grandparents who, later in the story, only add to a growing list of names to keep track of that muddle the details of the story. What could have been summed up in a few sentences or one chapter took several.
While Alice is written as a vehicle to tell Margaret’s story, the male main character, Hayden, feels much more like a sidekick than a romantic lead. That said, Henry’s talent for snappy, heartfelt dialogue does shine through at times. One of the most memorable exchanges comes when Hayden remarks to Alice:
“It’s yours,” he offers.
I laugh. “Oh? I can have the world?”
“Mine,” he says. “Yeah. You can have mine.”
Moments like this remind me of Henry’s usual magic, small sparks of intimacy tucked into ordinary conversation, even if they were too few and far between here.
The problem isn’t so much the lack of romantic moments; it’s that the romance was marketed as the heart of the story, but is consistently sidelined in favor of Margaret’s history. Alice and Hayden’s relationship often takes a back seat to endless recounting of family lineage and mystery threads. Instead of driving the narrative, the romance is treated almost like a subplot, surfacing only in scattered moments. For readers expecting Henry’s usual balance of emotional depth and swoony connection, this shift feels less like a creative choice and more like a bait-and-switch.
With the issue of sidelining their relationship, Alice and Hayden go from seemingly mortal enemies to instant lovers at an almost breakneck pace. Hayden was not given much time to develop as a character beyond the usual brooding and tall character traits. He goes from glowering and moody to in love with her in a matter of pages. While I am a sucker for any good enemies-to-lovers, it just felt unrealistic. It never felt clear what their attraction is based on, aside from being the only young people within a 10-mile radius.
Overall, I would give the premise of the book five stars. Two writers are competing to write the story of a lifetime about an eccentric and reclusive heiress, only recently out of hiding, with NDA’s and forced proximity on a small island. However, the execution of that plot deserves little over one and a half stars. The story got so bogged down in Margaret Ives and her family’s drama that the entire romance plotline between Alice and Hayden became background noise.
I think the book was misleadingly marketed as a romance. If Emily Henry had leaned more into the romance, or more toward the literary fiction or mystery, it could have been a better story. With the way she tried fitting it all together, it came out a bit jumbled and messy. In the end, I give the book 2.5 stars.