Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry Review

Before I begin: can we collectively retire the word chortle? Please, I’m on my hands and knees, please just say laugh. Every time I see chortle, the sexy MMC in my head shapeshifts into Tom Nook from Animal Crossing and then, even more disturbingly, Yoda. It’s an instant romance-killer.

Anyway, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I love Emily Henry. I really do. She’s my favorite modern romance author — Beach Read and Funny Story are five-star staples for me — and she’s the one writer I’ll preorder without even glancing at the blurb.

Which is why it hurts, genuinely hurts, to admit that Great Big Beautiful Life just wasn’t it.

Deep dive on Great Big Beautiful Life (spoiler-free)

The premise: 11/10

Two rival writers, Alice and Hayden, competing to tell the story of Margaret Ives — an elusive celebrity with a scandalous past — while being stuck together on a summer island. It’s got rivals-to-lovers potential, forced proximity, fame, glamour, mystery, and it sounded like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets Book Lovers (fantastic, gimme 14 of them right now).

Another part of why I was so excited is because Emily Henry isn’t afraid to push herself. She’s the romance queen of our generation (imo) and her prose is always stunning, often leaning toward literary fiction in a way that makes her stand out in the genre.

Here she combines romance with historical fiction, and while it didn’t fully click for me, I admire her a lot for branching out and I’m excited to see where this new direction takes her.

The execution: 4/10

However, somewhere between the setup and the delivery, the EmHen magic I’ve come to know and love… vanished. Instead of sizzling chemistry and razor-sharp banter between the two leads, most of the novel got swallowed by Margaret Ives’s life story. And not in a thrilling, page-turning way.

The only interesting parts about Margaret are retold long after the fact, which created this weird distance. I wasn’t in Margaret’s world; I was just observing it from afar. It reminded me of how I felt reading Daisy Jones and the Six: impressive plot, but the book kept me at arms length.

Margaret Ives

And here’s the thing: we were told everything about her life. Her career, her regrets, her scandals, her family drama, but who was she underneath all that? I still couldn’t tell you. Scared, yes. Regretful, yes. Longing for connection and redemption in her older years, sure. But beyond that? I’ve no idea.

The book insisted she was fascinating, but the feeling of fascination never arrived. I wanted glamour and scandalous secrets, but what we got was a biography stripped of intimacy that told me everything about her life but nothing about her soul.

And because Margaret dominated so much of the book, that lack of interiority weighed everything down. If she had been magnetic the imbalance could’ve worked, but she wasn’t. I ended up skimming every chapter that centred on her.

Our MCs, Alice and Hayden

I liked Alice. I liked Hayden. I did not like Alice and Hayden. The book told me they were in love, but I never felt it as they seemingly went from professional rivals to flirty friends to soulmates with no actual progression to be found.

Their relationship timeline had to be sped up significantly to make space for Margaret Ives who, as I’ve previously mentioned, I didn’t think was a character worthy of how much of the book centred on her. I wanted the slow burn Emily Henry is known and celebrated for, but this relationship was nuked in the microwave.

The twist

The twist surprised me and I liked it, but this plus the premise echoed The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so loudly it was distracting.

Normally I hate saying “this book reminds me too much of X,” but when a novel walks, talks, and dresses like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, the comparison becomes unavoidable. And unfortunately, all this twist did was remind me how much more emotionally resonant that book was.

Final verdict on Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

I didn’t hate reading this. Emily Henry’s prose is as gorgeous as ever, if not even more so, but beautiful writing can’t disguise a hollow core.

Margaret’s entire narrative was emotionally detached and I just didn’t find her interesting, Alice and Hayden’s romance was undercooked, and the novel as a whole felt like it was trying to be so many things at once without fully succeeding at any of it.