People We Meet on Vacation | ARC Review

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?

Review

I definitely wasn’t in love with this book, but I read the whole thing so…

The thing I liked the most about this book was the characters. Our two main characters, Alex and Poppy, were so quirky and original. Henry did an incredible job on creating them. They reacted in their own unique way to things. They were just very distinct and well developed characters. I felt like I actually knew them as people by the end of this book (even though I was always surprised by their responses to situations). Also, Poppy was hilarious. I’m so glad this book was from her POV.

I wasn’t really a fan of all the flashbacks to their previous summer vacations. I know it was helpful in getting to know and in understanding what went wrong between them, but I found them kinda uninteresting. Not boring, per say; I just didn’t really care about them. I kinda started scanning them towards the end.

Also, I was happy for the positive therapy promotion.

Overall, this book was fine. I enjoyed it, but I probably won’t read it again. And it won’t be the first book that comes to mind when people ask for romance recs. But I didn’t hate it.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed a gifted and advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rating

To check out my other reviews, click here. Or to check out more books by Emily Henry, go to her GoodReads profile or her website.