People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
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Synopsis:
Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.
Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.
Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.
Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.
Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations.
Review
“I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.”
Well, well, well it’s been a good long while since I’ve read a friends to lovers story that has made me go OKAY WHY DO I ALWAYS SAY I LOVE ENEMIES TO LOVERS BEST??!?!!? amirite?
This is only my second Emily Henry book but you better believe she has already skyrocketed up to the top of my favorite authors in the contemporary genre. Her writing is so crisp and her banter is hilarious but also REAL. Sometimes when authors lean too hard into banter it becomes almost TOO funny and therefore unbelievable. Like…are people really that funny? Are they always able to have these off the cuff back and forths??? Nahh lol.
Poppy and Alex though hit all my favorite everythings. They met in college and found out they were from neighboring towns but had never met before. They are different enough that their friendship easily wouldn’t have worked out…only that it did. Because not only are they special, but they are special to one another. They are the kind of person that you meet once and have this chance and maybe almost seemingly nonexistent spark with, maybe don’t see for some time, and then meet up and boom–it’s destiny. Does that make sense? It does for me because I had the same exact experience with my husband in college and looking back at the continuous CHANCE encounters of it all makes me giddy.
So, yes, I love this book for the reminders that it served me but also because of how it was told. We get snippets of their past and of their present. We find out what makes their relationship special, where things may have went “wrong,” where they fell in love, where they just couldn’t let one another go. The vacations themselves were also a perk to me because it’s the dead ass of winter here and any picture that can be painted of sunshine and warmth is a balm to my soul.
Overall I think…nay, I KNOW I loved this more than Beach Read even though that was soo, so good, too. I cannot wait to get my hands on anything and everything she comes up with next.
Friends-to-Lovers is my catnip, and Henry did an incredible job with this story. My heart! The feels are coming back reading this review. So happy you liked it!
Sam@wlabb recently posted…Five Star Friday: January 2022
SO MANY FEELSSSSSSSSS. This one was seriously one of the best books I’ve read in a while and it made me so, so happy!