As a fan of Emily Henry’s other books, this one wasn’t any different. I enjoyed the story thoroughly as Emily Henry does a great job of writing characters that are easy to get to know and have enjoyable and realistic banter. Great Big Beautiful Life (or Great BBL lol) is a slight departure from the other books in Henry’s catalogue. While yes, this is still a romance story, like Henry’s other books, there’s character development for both of the main characters. The difference in this story versus her other books is the addition of a third character whose story is actually the main story that is embedded into the romance between Alice and Hayden.
Great BBL is about two writers, Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson, who are competing for the rights to write Margaret Ives’s memoir. Margaret Ives is an old money starlet who was in and out of headlines in her youth simply for being part of the famous Ives family. She married rockstar Cosmo Sinclair, which added to her already high level of fame, and kept them both in the spotlight. Despite the fact that Margaret’s family owned several newspapers, she was perpetual headline fodder for the papers and the rags who seemingly made her believe that she and her family were cursed – which is why her story is one Alice sought out to be told; as it states in the beginning of the book – there are three sides of every story: yours, mine, and the truth.
Alice unexpectedly agrees to enter this competition with Hayden Anderson – she had no idea she was competing to begin with until they were both at dinner with Margaret. While they both signed NDAs, Alice decided to try to be friendly with him anyway given their commonality with Margaret; even if they couldn’t really talk about her. In getting to know each other, they fall for each other during the one month audition with Margaret. As the month winds down, things get complicated for Alice where she has to decide between her career and the possible love of her life.
While this story’s structure is different from the rest of Henry’s catalogue, it wasn’t a huge departure from her usual style of writing. I did find the element of hearing Maragaret’s story and trying to figure out the mystery with her was a fun addition. I didn’t guess the big reveal and was genuinely surprised when it was revealed. Outside of this, the other thing I noticed in this story is the excessive stressing of words. There are a lot of words that are stressed/italicized, to the point where it became noticeable rather quickly; I did a double take at one point towards the beginning of the book because I found it weird that so many words were being emphasized that often. It felt like Christopher Walken was a main character, and it momentarily took me out of the story every time I noticed. Now that I’ve finished the book, I’m not sure that the inclusion of so much emphasis did anything for the story.
That said, I did enjoy the story and ranked it as fourth in my EmHen rankings (sorry, Happy Place, you’re still ranking last) and gave it four stars. Can’t wait to see what else Emily Henry has up her sleeve in the future.
Check out my reviews for some of the other books in Emily Henry’s catalogue:
