Review: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Title: People We Meet on Vacation

Author: Emily Henry

Year Published: 2021

Category: Adult fiction (romance)

Pages: 361

Rating: 4 out of 5

Location (my 2021 Google Reading map):  USA (LA, CA, NY, OH, IN, IL), Canada

Summary (from Amazon): Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read comes a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations.  

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:  I liked Emily Henry's first novel, Beach Read, a bunch so was looking forward to this one when I got it from Book of the Month.

This is a light and fun book that I read in just a couple days. I liked the format of storytelling in which alternates between the summer trip happening now and each of the previous twelve summer trips starting with the first and moving forward. As each summer trips is described, we get to know more about both Alex and Poppy as well as their friendship. I am sure every reader knows the ending before beginning the book, but that doesn't matter because it's the journey that matters (and I'd be angry if it had a different ending).

Alex and Poppy are both likable characters and their friendship is real. They bring out the best in one another, have an important shared history, annoy the heck out of one another, and support each other no matter what. That's the best part. I enjoyed being along for the ride as these two figure out what they want in life and from each other.

Challenges for which this counts:

• A to Z (alphabet)--"E"
• Popsugar--main character is in my dream job (travel writer). I say this is my dream job, but I am not a good enough writer... that's why it's a dream.