what I read last week
great big beautiful life, ghost soldiers
Good evening!
Sorry for going awol last week. My husband and I drove across the country as part of our big move to Brooklyn, and I didn’t actually finish any books that week (a first for me this year!).
But we’re now getting settled in our new place, and I have been reading again. Last week, I finished a fiction book, Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry, and a nonfiction novel, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides. Let’s get into it.
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Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
Great Big Beautiful Life is a contemporary fiction novel that follows two rival writers, Alice and Hayden, as they compete for a chance to write the biography of a reclusive heiress living in a small town on the Georgia coast.
Overview: Great Big Beautiful Life opens with Alice Scott arriving in Little Crescent Island, Georgia, to meet Margaret Ives, a publishing heiress who was married to a famous musician, Cosmo, who was a rival of Elvis.
Alice soon discovers that another writer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hayden Anderson, also wants to work on Margaret’s biography. Margaret decides to let them each have a trial period, and she will decide who should write her biography at the end of the month.
As Alice and Hayden each begin to interview Margaret, they quickly learn that she isn’t being entirely candid about her past. Henry follows the two writers as they uncover Margaret’s history while also falling for one another.
Opinion: Great Big Beautiful Life has been marketed as Book Lovers (an Emily Henry romance novel) meets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (a Taylor Jenkins Reid bestseller). While I loved both of these books, Great Big Beautiful Life disappointed me.
Henry alternates between accounts of Margaret’s life and the present-day experience of Alice and Hayden. Margaret’s narrative seemed like a lot of telling rather than showing. At times, it read like a lengthy Wikipedia account of a fictional woman.
The love story between Alice and Hayden, unfortunately, did not compensate for this dull plot line. Hayden and Alice read like romance novel tropes (grumpy x sunshine). I don’t necessarily have a problem with tropes—there are tropes for a reason! However, in this case, Alice and Hayden each had basically no personality, and there was little to no romance development. I was genuinely surprised that they developed feelings for each other.
Henry was trying to do a lot with this one—it’s part literary fiction, part romance, and part mystery novel. I don’t think she was able to execute any of these subgenres, which makes for an underwhelming read.
Overall: I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone I like. If you are interested in this premise, I would instead suggest an actual memoir by a famous heiress (like Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir), a fun historical fiction novel about a fictional celebrity (like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo), or a better-developed romance novel (like Emily Henry’s Book Lovers).
Rating: 2.5/5
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Notable prizes/book clubs/lists: Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick (April 2025)
Page count: 432 pages
Audio: 12 hr 2 min
Movie/TV pairings: Elvis, All the Money in the World
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides
Ghost Soldiers is a nonfiction account of the experience of Allied troops in the Philippines over four years, from the Bataan Death March in April 1942 to the rescue of 531 Allied prisoners of war from Camp Cabanatuan on the Philippine island of Luzon in January 1945. Sides recounts the war from the perspectives of the Allied prisoners of war and their rescuers.
Overview: In April 1942, General Edward King, the commander of 78,000 American and Filipino troops on Bataan, surrendered to the Japanese. The Japanese took the forces captive and marched them 60 miles through the jungle on foot with little food or water. Thousands died of disease, starvation, and abuse at the hands of the Japanese. Sides reconstructs the experience of the Allied troops on the ground in unflinching detail.
Three years later, MacArthur and the Allied troops began gradually taking back the Philippine islands. At a prison camp on Palawan Island in December 1944, Imperial Japanese soldiers executed 139 Allied prisoners of war as the Allied forces approached.
Fearing another massacre, MacArthur dispatched a cadre of U.S. Army Rangers to rescue the more than 500 Allied prisoners of war, including the last survivors of the Bataan Death March, held by the Japanese on Luzon.
In January 195, 121 U.S. Army Rangers, commanded by Henry Mucci, marched more than 30 miles behind enemy lines to reach the POW camp. The rangers were not well-trained for complex rescue attempts, but their goal was clear. Mucci instructed the troops: “You’re going to bring out every last man, even if you have to carry them on your backs.” And that is what the rangers literally had to do, as most of the prisoners were too ill to walk. Sides follows the rescuers and POWs through this grueling but successful mission.
Opinion: After reading (and loving) The Wide Wide Sea last year, I have slowly been making my way through all of Hampton Sides’s past books. Similar to The Wide Wide Sea and On Desperate Ground, Ghost Soldiers is not for the faint of heart. Sides’s descriptions of war are gruesome, and he spares no details. Ghost Soldiers is impressively well-researched, and Sides deftly weaves in countless records into a vivid narrative account.
Overall: I would highly recommend this book to a World War II history lover, but it’s not for everyone! It’s quite dense, and the descriptions of wartime atrocities can be disturbing.
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Nonfiction (World War II)
Page count: 344 pages
Audio: 5 hours 57 minutes
Movie/TV pairings: The Pacific
consumed 🎬🎧🗞️→
“The aesthetics of accessibility: design for disability that’s dynamic not dreary.”
Author Naoise Dolan on expressing emotions through writing and the writers’ obsession with “show, don’t tell.”
cooked 🍳→
