About the Book
Title: Great Big Beautiful Life
Author: Emily Henry
Series: none
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 432
Edition Read: Hardcover Library Book
Dates Read: July 22 – 27, 2026
Blurb: Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years–or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.
When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.
One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.
Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication.
Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.
But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.
And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad… depending on who’s telling it.
Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.
Review
This is the second book by Emily Henry that I’ve read and both of them have been due to my GoodReads Awards Challenge. I really love how that challenge has moved me away from the books I would normally read and helped me find new things that I’ve really enjoyed.
Romance was never a genre I liked, mostly because it always felt predictable. Here is boy, here is girl, they will be together by the end of the book. What I’ve liked about Henry’s books so far, and this book in particular, is that there is a larger story that is bigger than just the relationship of our two mains. Alice is absolutely adorable, Hayden seems way too young to be as curmudgeonly as he is – and while you see them drawing closer throughout the story, there is also this underlying mystery about Margaret.
I’ll be honest, I was way more interested in Margaret’s story than whether or not Alice and Hayden would figure out their relationship. As they each interview her, it’s clear that she’s telling them each different things, and it makes everything she says suspect. You know she’s hiding something, despite so much of her life recorded in tabloids, but you don’t know what. It was her life that kept drawing me deeper and deeper into this story. The twist at the end was very interesting and explained a lot of her motivations throughout the book.
Because of Margaret, this book felt like a mystery we were trying to solve, almost more than a romance, but the romance part was also really good. Alice has reasons for being as bubbly as she is, and Hayden has reasons for being so guarded, and seeing them get closer and begin to work through some of their issues was really sweet. This book was just overall a good read. All parts of it.
GoodReads rating: 5 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
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