People We Meet on Vacation – Emily Henry

Genre: Romance
Publisher:
Pages: 365
Release Date: May 11, 2021

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?

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Maybe Emily Henry novels aren’t for me afterall. I read her debut novel, Beach Reach, a while ago and disliked it. Her second novel, Book Lovers, had an interesting enough premise to hook me, so I bought it, read it, and loved it. Unfortunately, People We Meet on Vacation fell flat.

I enjoyed the dual timeline as it slowly offered readers more insight into Poppy and Alex’s friendship as well as who they were as individuals. Unfortunately, both of the differing timelines were only told from Poppy’s perspective. This was unfortunate because Poppy was slightly annoying and impulsive. Alex’s actions at the end of the novel are definitely justified after reading the entirety of the novel from Poppy’s perspective.

For a friends-to-lovers novel, there was a surprising lack of angst. There were moments peppered throughout the past vacation chapters, however they were incredibly brief and far and few between. 

People We Meet on Vacation built up tension by withholding the big moment that caused Poppy and Alex to stop speaking. Unfortunately, this moment had me scratching my head as it wasn’t what I assumed it to be. Instead, it felt like a moment two virginal teenagers overreact over.

I guess I just didn’t connect with Poppy as a character and found her feelings for Alex after two years apart unrealistic as there was no build up back to what they used to be. I completely understand Alex at the end of the novel. I would also be apprehensive of Poppy’s intentions.

Overall, People We Meet on Vacation was disappointing in its execution as there was a lack of angst and chemistry between the main characters.

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Have you read People We Meet on Vacation? What did you think?