Title: People We Meet on Vacation
Author: Emily Henry
Publisher: Berkley
Publication date: May 11th, 2021
384 pages
3.5/5 stars
Goodreads 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?
Review
People We Meet on Vacation follows Alex and Poppy, best friends from college who traditionally take a trip every summer with each other – except the last two years when something horrible happened, and they haven’t spoken since. Poppy is feeling stagnant in life without Alex, so she wants to restart the trips but isn’t sure if Alex will want to hear from her. Told in alternating time lines, we read past vacations Poppy & Alex took along with how the present day trip goes.
What I really liked about this book was the characters, especially Alex. In terms of trope, this definitely fits the grumpy/sunshine trope for characters, which is a favorite of mine. I liked reading about the start of their friendship in college and how different they were, but how they built the long lasting friendship. Even their families were complete opposites but in a fun way.
However, I had a hard time with the pacing of the book with the alternating timeline. I kept getting disconnected from the story and pulled away from it. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the ending, though I respect why it was chosen to end that way. It just doesn’t fit the mold of a romance book that I prefer, and that’s okay! It’s not a reason not to read this book by any means.
If you read Beach Read, definitely check out this next one from Emily Henry.
Thank you to Berkley and Netgalley for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Happy reading, folks!
Baltimore Bibliophile 