Alice is a pop culture journalist – think Buzzfeed, Cosmo, that kind of thing. Hayden is a Serious Journalist – Pulitzer prize winner for a biography of a beloved rock star who died of Alzheimer’s. Their personalities match their jobs. Alice is fizzy and fun and sparkling, and Hayden is… grumpy. And now they’re both in a little town on an island off the coast of Georgia, competing for the opportunity to write the biography of the century.
Margaret Ives is the sole surviving member of the famous Ives family. She and her sister were the It Girls of the 50s and 60s, her family as wealthy as the Rockefellers or the Morgans, her father just as ruthless, and when you mix in her rock star husband, well, there’s a story to be told. She’s been a recluse for the last twenty or thirty years, but she’s in her eighties now, and she’s decided it’s time to set the record straight, once and for all.>br?
Alice and Hayden think they are there to compete for the rights to co-author the story. They have a month to interview Margaret and present her with their approach to the story. But what neither of them know is that Margaret isn’t telling them the whole story.
Of course, Alice and Hayden also fall in love. But then of course there is Drama, and (highlight to see spoiler):it’s not helped along by the discovery that Hayden is Margaret’s secret grandson, the son of the daughter that Margaret gave up for adoption years ago.
I’ll say that I liked this more than I thought I would. Margaret spins some good yarns, and there were some mysteries that kept me guessing. I knew that Hayden was related somehow, but it took me longer than I care to admit to connect the dots. And there were even a couple of reveals that I totally missed, probably because I approached this as a skim while I laid around kind of book. If I had one gripe, it would be that Alice was a little too peppy and Hayden a little too grumpy, but that’s a tiny nit to pick.
I’ll pick up more by Emily Henry for sure.
