Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (April 22, 2025)
Many thanks to Berkley Romance and PRH Audio for the #gifted advanced reading and listening copies of one of my most anticipated reads of 2025!
Margret Ives was once splashed across every gossip page – a rich heiress linked to a famous singer. But her story is laced with tragedy and mystery. Then she completely disappeared. Speculation about what happened to her has run rampant for decades. Alice Scott is a writer looking for her big break, when she’s invited to meet with a woman claiming to be the long-lost Margaret Ives to potentially tell her story, she jumps at the chance. But she’s not alone. Pulitzer winner Hayden Anderson is also there. Margaret wants to spend a month working with them both (separately, with ironclad NDAs) to decide who she’ll give the coveted story. Over a month, all of their lives will be transformed by the stories Margaret has to tell. But is she telling them the same stories and what is the truth?
WOW. Please don’t go into this expecting the beachy rom-com Emily Henry is known for – this is something else entirely. It’s literary, it has a little bit of mystery, a lot of emotions, and is a story that you won’t fully appreciate until it is finished. Yes, there’s a slow-burning rivals-to-lovers romance between Alice and Hayden, but the soul of this story is Margaret: an unforgettable, elusive octogenarian reckoning with love, loss, legacy, and the cost of truth. Her story, and the generations of heartbreak and hope she carries, completely captivated me.
This novel explores what it means to know someone, especially the people we think we understand most. It’s about families, fame, reinvention, and the stories we tell to survive. I was completely immersed and left feeling very emotional at the end.
I really enjoyed the pacing and structure of this book between the past and the present, the truth and the tabloid perception. It is an entirely new structure from Henry’s contemporary romance books – think The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo more than Beach Read or Book Lovers. I am always thrilled when an author gives us a new lens through which to explore their talent and that’s what GBBL did for me with Emily Henry.
🎧 Audiobook Thoughts 🎧 Julia Whelan brings so much tenderness and gravity to this performance. She fully embodies these characters, especially Margaret’s complex emotional arc. Her narration made me feel every ache, every flicker of longing, every buried truth. (11h 30m)
Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫
Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Spice: 🌶️🌶️
Book Smart Kate 