BOOK REVIEW
“Great Big Beautiful Life,“ by Emily Henry
Did the genre “beach read” exist before Emily Henry arrived on the adult literary scene in 2020?
That label, in fact, is the title of her first novel, “Beach Read,” and has, in the last few years, crowned Henry as the “Queen of the Beach Read.”
What constitutes a beach read? Love, romance, heart break, banter, family secrets, relationship troubles, rivals, and most of all a BEACH setting – all intrinsic ingredients.
¡Voila! – Enter Emily Henry’s “Great Big Beautiful Life,” released in April, and recently included in Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club.
Set on Little Crescent Island, just off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, this story features April Scott as the narrator of the frame story, which includes the quintessential triangle – April, Hayden Anderson, and the legendary Margaret Grace Ives.
Ives sets up a competition between biographical writers, April and Hayden, to interview her in her home and finally, after a month of interviews with her, to submit proposals for her eventual tell-all.
Ives, an 80-year-old recluse, personally invites Hayden, a Pulitzer Prize winner, but allows April, a staff writer for a celebrity news publication, to also participate because — through sheer inventive ingenuity, April has tracked Margaret down by herself.
April, who already has a boyfriend, sees Hayden as a “bear at a tea party,” and after a second meeting, decides “he’s a mistrustful cynic,” just after he has told her “I’m not going to stop, so you can just back off.”
And they’re off.
As opposites, they attract: April – positive and happy; Hayden – dark and “off putting!” As the story progresses and they lead their separate lives interviewing Margaret, they find themselves inadvertently drawn to each other. It’s a “beach read,” after all.
As a child, Margaret Ives led the charmed life of fabulous wealth and notoriety as a “tabloid princess,” and married the uber famous song writer and singer, Cosmos Sinclair. (Think Elvis)
Spoiler alert: The reader must mentally record a litany of characters in Margaret’s circle; grandparents, parents, step-parents, sister, and a host of friends. In fact, readers, remember the motif, “Nicollet!”
Through her interviews with April and Hayden, Margaret’s life emerges, beginning with the machinations of her ancestors to acquire wealth and, eventually, the burdens of power. Often the plot thickens, through conversation rather than action, but Henry gives her some great lines, like, “I’m going to be trotting out the family’s map to all the buried bodies.”
Even so, the chatter highlights Henry’s great control of the language.
In chronicling what riches had done to her family, Margaret laments, “It’ll gladly eat you alive and floss with your bones.”
Though “Great Big Beautiful Life” spends time on April and Hayden’s relationship, Margaret’s sordid, sad, privileged life shares equal page time: parent troubles, sibling troubles, marriage troubles – all tangled webs.
Also, as an example of the stereotypical beach read, the three main characters struggle with the heavy load of troubling relationships — particularly women’s, mothers’ and sisters’.
April notes of her mother, “Mom’s love has always been an action, rather than words.”
Hayden struggles with anxiety over his family’s history, and Margaret, even at her age, cannot reconcile her sister’s life with reality.
Then the twist at the end …Wait for it!
Not to spoil the conclusion, but … since this is a beach read, the problems, anxieties, and mysteries are all tied up into a neat “Great Big Beautiful” bow in the last few pages.
Emily Henry actually began her literary ventures in 2016 with a series of young adult, coming-of-age, novels, and although she met success with this age group, her career really took off with her first adult offering, “Beach Read,” in 2020, garnering her accolades, and “bestseller” status.
— Kay Bradshaw Holland is a retired English teacher and writes book reviews for the Concho Observer.
