REVIEW:

Do you believe in love after first sight? After reading People We Meet on Vacation, I sure do.

My first date with author Emily Henry didn’t go so hot. Her previous book, Beach Read, was like sand in my shorts. Not all that enjoyable. It was therefore with some trepidation that I decided to dip a toe back into her rom-com waters, and to my pleasant surprise I didn’t want to leave them this time.

The romance trope at play here is friends-to-lovers, since readers follow the relationship of platonic besties Alex and Poppy as they take annual summer vacations together for 10 years. He’s a little bit khaki. She’s a little bit roaming soul.

Which makes it a whole lot When Harry Met Sally, if Harry and Sally’s genders were reversed. And they were Millennials. With passports. And Tinder.

Will they or won’t they? Should they? To buy into stories like this, you have to believe that people can be friends for long periods of time without acting on underlying romantic urges. Emily Henry successfully throws roadblock after roadblock on the way to Steamville, so despite my initial skepticism I did actually understand how Alex and Poppy could exist, albeit uncomfortably, in the friend zone.

As for Emily Henry and me, I’m now eagerly awaiting our third date together. She’s already set the scene for seduction by calling it Book Lovers. Apparently she does speak my love language after all.

PUBLISHER 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?

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