In Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry, Alice Scott is a writer determined to find her big break, and she thinks she’s found it when she tracks down Margaret Ives, heiress to a famous family and who famously vanished from the public eye two decades ago. But when Alice arrives in the tiny Georgia island where Margaret now lives, she learns that she isn’t the only one to have found Margaret: Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hayden Anderson is here too, also pitching himself as writer of Margaret’s biography. Margaret agrees to give them each one month to interview her and create a writing sample, and Alice is desperate to win. She and Hayden are rather prickly, after all, and she needs this work to put her name on the map. But the more she interacts with both Margaret and Hayden, the more she wonders if the former is telling the truth, and if the latter is more compatible with her than he seemed.

I’ve read pretty much all of Emily Henry’s books by now, and they’re all pretty good! This one has a fun extra layer of story, interweaving Margaret’s account of her life with the contemporary timeline of Alice and Hayden. It’s cool to see Henry play with narrative structure in this way.

I also liked the characters, especially Alice. She’s very sweet and eager to make connections with people, but also dealing with insecurities and a complicated relationship with her mother, especially after her father—whom she was closer to—passed away a few years before. This tenuous bond with her mother adds a more serious tone and allows for some great character development. I really liked her arc throughout the book.

Hayden is also a good character—he starts out a taciturn, businesslike grump, but Alice quickly is able to see that this is hiding a softer side. It’s nice to see him start to open up and let his personality show around her, from his quirks and idiosyncrasies to his thoughts about his job and about Margaret. I like him and Alice together, though their romance is a little frustrating at the start because of how “will they, won’t they” it is. But that’s just me; I want people to just communicate smoothly, even though that would probably take a lot of interesting tension away from the story.

As for Margaret, she’s a pretty fascinating character too. I really enjoyed the chapters that were from her perspective (though we’re to understand that these are what Alice is recording, so we must take it with a grain of salt). The glimpses into a complex family history of strife and striving for wealth is intriguing, and seeing how such a group like Margaret, her sister, and their parents live—an incredibly affluent lifestyle, reminiscent of the Vanderbilts—is wild. It’s so weird to imagine an existence like that, wanting for nothing except a little bit of privacy. No thanks.

And Margaret’s romance with a famous rock star is quite engaging too (I’ve gone blank on his name, but please don’t judge me: it’s actually been a week since I finished this book as I write this review, and I’ve completed two other books since then). At times, I found the Margaret chapters even more interesting than the Alice chapters, so it kind of made for a slightly uneven reading experience, but maybe that’s just me.

The audiobook is also excellent. As ever, Julia Whelan (who’s narrated every Henry book I’ve read) does a wonderful job, infusing a lot of emotion and personality into the voices of these characters. And in the end, Great Big Beautiful Life was an entertaining story about love, sacrifice, memory, and connection. The characters are well-rounded, the arcs interesting, and the love stories are touching, with the right amount of spice. It’s not a ground-breaking novel, but it’s still well worth a read.

Great Big Beautiful Life is available now!