I read Beach Read, Emily Henry’s first adult rom com, last summer and I loved it so much. It sparked my continued reading of romance. After a few months of quarantine, I was struggling to read, but romance was a genre that was … happy and light and just what I needed.
People We Meet on Vacation was one of my anticipated reads of 2021 and it didn’t disappoint. Poppy and Alex met in college and were best friends for 10 years, spending one week each summer together in beautiful places. But two summers ago, they had a falling out and haven’t spoken since. This summer, Poppy is struggling to find inspiration and feels unfulfilled—until she realizes the last time she was happy was on that fateful trip. In an attempt to salvage the friendship, Poppy texts Alex. When he agrees, Poppy is determined to finally fix the broken relationship.
A classic friends-to-lovers romance, this is a steamy, humorous story of two friends whose stubbornness and fear nearly ruins everything. What Henry does best is balance lightness with depth – her romances feel authentic, like they could really happen. The characters’ actions are not so unforgivable as to make any relationship after toxic. Moreover, friends-to-lovers is, to me, always preferable to enemies-to-lovers because it feels more genuine and realistic (not to mention the hatred in enemies-to-lovers usually comes from one person treating the other terribly and then is easily forgiven or it’s because of a misunderstanding that is resolved quickly).
Alex and Poppy’s friendship was supportive and loving, but I felt for them because it was blatantly obvious that they liked each other and neither one was willing to acknowledge it first because they were too scared to f*ck the whole thing up. Henry is an auto-buy author for me.
Highly recommend if you enjoy: friends-to-lovers, influencer culture, quirky characters, and steamy scenes!
Read It Like Rory 