﷜
..

🌰 great big beautiful life - a book review

Note: this review contains spoilers

What Worked

  • the themes
    • the curse of fame, the complicity of the public in that curse
    • generational love and trauma – the ways we try to love our children, the things we sacrifice for our family even when it’s not enough or isn’t something they understand or isn’t what they actually need. How we can end up hurting them too, without trying or meaning to, just in the process of living a human life
  • the audiobook was phenomenal. Any reviews where folks were like “I didn’t care about the characters
” didn’t listen to the audiobook I think
  • Margaret’s story was surprisingly compelling
  • I love a slow burn where I can understand why the characters love each other. This was mostly that.
  • the TWISTS the REVEAL, I did NOT see that coming
    • This is one of the few romances where “I must keep a secret from you and it is destroying our relationship” absolutely makes sense to me:
      1. I completely believe as a reader that no, Alice can’t be with Hayden while keeping his own past from him and
      2. I believe as a reader why she can’t tell him.
      3. she’s not lying “for his own good” (or lying to herself about it being for his own good)
      4. (less important, but I wonder if it helps that it’s not a lie that carries us from the beginning)
  • Alice feels things very viscerally and deeply. On the one hand, appreciate the different perspective. On the other hand, sometimes I didn’t always get it. But it wasn’t a problem.

What Didn’t

  • In hindsight, Hayden’s desire for the job doesn’t really hold together. At the beginning he’s very competitive for it, he decides to stay to fight for it. He’s adamant that he’s going to get it. But then by the end Margaret is saying she needed to invite Alice down to pique Hayden’s interest, to get him to take the idea seriously. But then
he acts like he doesn’t know who Alice is when he sees her with Margaret? Anyway it doesn’t quite fit.
  • Sometimes Hayden and Alice (when together) talked a little too much like they were doing therapy out loud

Don't want to do that? @ me on twitter or mastodon

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.