Book Club: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

As always, some spoilers -- the biggest one is that this is my top book by her, to date!

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Bookshop | Amazon)

Synopsis: 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 twentieth 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.

TL;DR: Family trauma + literary rivals + southern humidity + intergenerational mystery = amazing, amazing read

Many More Thoughts:

When I wrote about this book in my 2025 Non-Exhaustive Preview (check it out, there are so many book recs there!) actually turned out to be shockingly prescient:

I feel like I’ve seen this on every TBR preview post in my (niche) booktok circle, and that’s because Emily Henry has become an auto buy for many of us for her thoughtful books, complex characters, and a guaranteed happy ending. While it’s going to be hard to knock Book Lovers off as my favorite of her books, I’m looking forward to her newest.

It did in fact knock Book Lovers off the top of my personal Emily Henry pyramid, which has held for years. Way to go, Emily.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book, and I was hooked from like Chapter 2 — I even texted a few friends at page 100 that I thought this might be my favorite of hers. The conceits were familiar: rivals-to-friends-to-lovers, mysterious family history, fish out of water, but the way she weaved them together was wonderful.

From the get go, I really liked Alice, which isn’t always the case for me (sometimes, I get annoyed by FMCs written by Emily) — I liked her ambition, I liked her back story, I liked her self-deprecation, and I liked her enthusiasm. She felt relatable, like someone that I’ve known in my real life. I was obviously rooting for her to succeed, and while I did not predict the ending, I feel confident in saying that Alice got her happy ending.

I never really want these to be focused on the plot specifically, because these are my thoughts and not a formal book review, but I can’t resist talking about the plot. It’s a great plot — two very different writers, competing to write the memoir of an American icon who has been out of the public eye for two decades.

I loved that Margaret brought Hayden and Alice to her to compete to write her story, setting up a conflict between them in the best way. I loved that we still only get to hear Margaret’s side of the story that she told Alice — what did she tell Hayden? I loved that we got to go back to the beginning to see how the Ives family lore progressed over the generations.

Beyond that, the world that she created on Little Crescent Island was so welcoming — the side characters were great, the location felt like a real place and not just something in her imagination, and I would kill to try a Fish Bowl.¹

A few additional notes before I get into my minor rants:

• I wish that we could have had a family tree at some point — even if it was at the back of the book so nothing was spoiled! — because there were a lot of Ives family members to keep track of, intergenerationally.²

• I liked how she framed the Margaret chapters with presenting a rumor about the family and then the story behind the rumor. That was a great way to do it, and a good way to show how easily celebrity culture can be twisted.

• I am so, so tempted to buy some Little Croissant Cafe merch, just because the branding is so good.

• Normally, I don’t need a companion novel to a story like this, but I would love to see Hayden’s side of everything, even more than he told Alice (and us). I would also love to read the book about Margaret’s life.

• I didn’t recognize the mosaic on the cover until after I saw it on TikTok, and wow, I love it so much.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse on the Internet about how people hated this book because it wasn’t a capital-R Romance, and girlybugs, I have something to tell you — none of her books are capital-R Romances. She’s not in the same category as an Ali Hazelwood, a Tessa Bailey, or an Elle Kennedy. Emily’s books have always skewed more women’s literary fiction than romance — that is, books about strong women that happen to have romance as one of the plots. I’m not sure why people thought she might switch genres now, but I do appreciate that she pushed even further away from that stereotype with her newest.

I’ve also seen a lot of chatter about how this is a rip off of The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hugo, and again, I have to disagree. To me, the only similarities is that there’s a Hollywood connection, and an intergenerational story being told. It has been a while since I’ve read Evelyn Hugo, to be fair, but in that book, Evelyn was the star.³ Here, the main focus is on Alice, who learns lessons about herself through Margaret’s story and Hayden’s companionship. Apples and oranges — plus, Taylor Jenkins Reid didn’t create this conceit, and Emily won’t be the last to use it.

All in all, a huge success for me — and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts, if you’ve already read it. Let me know! Come yap with me!

1. The Fish Bowl may kill me first.

2. I don’t think this is a word, but it’s okay, right?

3. Controversial, but Evelyn Hugo isn’t even in my top three TJR books.