Great Big Beautiful Life

“Great Big Beautiful Life” by Emily Henry was promised to be just that: The love child of a well-known romance author, centring on two authors set against each other. The prize: To write a book about a famous socialite from a legendary family who disappeared and is shrouded in mystery.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, while this novel had high hopes of growing up to become Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”, a strong and bold story, “Life”’s story is immensely conventional. Whereas “Life” is “Dallas” or “Dynasty”, “Husbands” is “The Crown”.

Margaret Ives, our former socialite, has no special story to tell our authors. It’s just a rich-girl story with some drama and tragedy and some, very simplistic, family secrets.

Alice Scott, an author at a run-of-the-mill yellow press gossip magazine, senses the chance of a lifetime when she finds Margaret. Sadly, she just isn’t a very interesting or convincing character. She falls in love with her competitor, Hayden, a Pulitzer Prize winner, at first glance. Apart from the friction due to both being after the same job, there is practically no chemistry between them.

Hayden is portrayed as the typical “grumpy” love interest which is pretty much all he is throughout the entire novel. He hardly has any discernible character, and despite spending almost as much time with Margaret as Alice does, we never see his perspective. In stark contrast to the tediously detailed interviewing sessions between the two female leads, we’re told only sparingly about his own experiences.

Seemingly worried we might not understand the dual timelines of the narration, Henry plasters a huge “The Story” over every part that tells Margaret’s story (as narrated by Alice). What follows is a brief, one-sentence ‘Their version’ headline from the yellow press, and then a much longer “Her version”.

In between, we get encounters between Alice and Hayden, but most of the time they simply hold back or occasionally even push each other away. Their story is just as boring and superficial as all the family drama around Margaret is conventional, convoluted, and rarely believable.

The writing is typically Henry: adequate but nothing special. Compared to Henry’s romance novels, this one feels like she tried to write a romance/family story crossover, but thoroughly failed at both. Emily Henry is to Taylor Jenkins Reid what Katherine Heigl is to Meryl Streep: they may share a profession, but they are not in the same league.

Two stars out of five.

Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam