Format: Net Galley Advanced Reader Copy
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Page Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Berkley Romance (May 11, 2021)
Star Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mr. Darcy‘s Rating: “You have bewitched me, body and soul.”
A Chasing Mr. Darcy Review
I was so excited when Net Galley and Berkley gave me a digital advanced copy of People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry. After the acclaim that met Beach Read, I knew this would be a wonderful book, and I was not wrong.
Here’s a plot synopsis from Amazon: 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?
Above all else, this book made me feel. It made me feel the longing between Alex and Poppy over years of friendship and “almosts” that never quite led to the more they both wanted. It made me yearn for the closeness of their relationship and miss my friends from college that I rarely see nowadays. It made me want, it made me laugh, and it made me cry. Ultimately, though, it made me happy! This book was full of ups and downs, but it left me feeling that love is always worth taking a chance on.
This book also made me think about the Alex in my life, the friend that was my everything in college. My Alex was the friend I could always call, cry on his shoulder, or just hug when I needed it (or when he needed it). We did most everything together during my last two years of college, and there were so many “almosts” that I lost count along the way. So many lines crossed a little just to skitter back over to the other side of the line, the safe line, the friend line…just to turn around and volley with that line all over again. Truly, that is what People We Meet on Vacation is about. Two friends who constantly played bumper boats with the line of friendship, both wanting to break their relationship wide open but neither willing to push too hard. I know that feeling all to well, and I think that’s why this book spoke to me on so many levels. I felt every emotion with the characters, and I loved every minute of it. I was disappointed with a few things in the story (Ie, Poppy’s monologue at the end of the book needed some work, and the events of Croatia were disappointing after the buildup), but I loved that the relationship between Poppy and Alex was unveiled in layers. The chapters alternate between the past and the present, and that makes the feelings both characters have even stronger for the reader because we get both the butterflies of the first stirrings of love and the yearning that comes with wanting what you believe you cannot have combined with the satisfaction of finding the person who completes your soul.
Emily Henry is a gem, and People We Meet on Vacation is a contemporary romance gift to the world.
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