BookBrowse Reviews Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

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A genre-mixing meditation on love sketched upon a larger-than-life canvas.

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Love, often couched in other themes or squeezed between ideas and concepts of apparent greater effect in literary fiction, rarely enjoys exploration for its own sake in its naked simplicity. However, Emily Henry regards love as a worthy element and intrinsic part of a meaningful life, passed down in various permutations and impacting generations. Shining an unwavering spotlight on love through all her previous romance novels, Henry doubles down in Great Big Beautiful Life, rendering the power of love with a bigger paintbrush and a larger canvas.

The book's premise is that two journalists, Alice and Hayden, are competing for the chance to write the biography of the elusive and enigmatic Margaret Ives, one-time heiress of a dynastic media empire. What emerges from this arrangement is a story-within-a-story structure that delves into the many loves and lives of Margaret's family, while also exploring the leads' budding romance and the individual issues each must work through before they can enter into a healthy, functional, lasting relationship. These issues are often resolved by characters taking the time and space to work on themselves — a pattern all of the author's characters share. Henry's women are generally unabashed workaholics — work is what gives them purpose, meaning, and gratification to the point that they might even teeter towards being consumed by it. But they are never punished for it. They never lose out on the bigger things in life, such as love or friendship. Their choices and priorities are treated with respect.

The two narrative threads (Margaret's story and Alice and Hayden's relationship) echo themes and speak to one another, so that the book feels cohesive and whole. Alice and Hayden's relationship drives the engine of the book as a romance, but it is with Margaret's story that Henry picks up and pulls apart more deeply the many aspects of love — romantic love, yes, but also the other kinds of love that bind us to this life on earth: parent-child; the love between siblings; and even parasocial love, or the love and adoration one develops for public figures. The central love story is handled with care and sensitivity. There is something beyond simple heterosexual attraction that develops between Alice and Hayden: they have true companionship and the intimacy and tenderness of kindred spirits. They are often shown pulling each other into a hug, tenderly kissing, or just remaining close to each other without touching.

It is within this overarching theme of love, distilled further in exploring the intricacies of parental expectations and the poignant, complicated bonds between mothers and daughters, that Henry gives us the gift of the book being more than just a romance.

Apart from the innate mystique arising from Margaret's glamour-infused, distinct world, misgivings about the veracity of what she narrates as her life story, about her intentions to do so, and her very identity lace Great Big Beautiful Life with mystery. Alice and Hayden are then tasked with working together to find and fill in the gaps and evasions in Margaret's tale. This genre-mixing elevates the book, and yet the mystery aspect fits quite neatly within the structure and tropes of the romance genre.

It is a big task that the writer sets up for herself. Within the genre of the contemporary romance novel, Henry attempts to tell the life story of an heiress and her family's rise to wealth and power, the secrets that developed along the way as they courted the public and were courted by it, culminating in Margaret's larger-than-life love affair with a pop star. The canvas is grand, the strokes are broad; the characters could very well be amalgamations of famous dynasties from the real world. The picture painted is beautiful and striking.

This review first ran in the June 4, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.