People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry - Book Review
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Table of contents
⛰ What It's About (No Spoilers)
Poppy lives the dream life—she earns a good wage, works at her dream job, and has great connections. One day, she realizes she doesn’t want anything—she’s already achieved all of her dreams. Her friend asks her to remember back to the last time she was really happy, and all she can remember is going on summer trips with her best friend, Alex. They haven’t talked in a while, however, so Poppy seeks to mend her friendship.
Rating
4/5.
🔍 How I Discovered It
I saw this book on Tik Tok, and it was voted as the best romance of 2021 on Goodreads. Barnes & Noble also had it everywhere for a while.
🧠 Thoughts (Spoilers)
So, I guess contemporary romances are very predictable. At least, that’s what one of my friends said. Regardless, I think the book’s predictability made me disinclined to give it a 5-star rating. If Feynman’s autobiography can be unpredictable, then I think a fiction romance book should be able to, too. I may be underestimating the skill it takes to create such a book, though. After all, romance seems to follow cliches, whether in real life or literature.
Basically, someone liked their best friend but didn’t want to ruin what they had in between them. Then, they realize that it’s dreadful just being their best friend and watching them date (and potentially marry) the wrong people. So, they confess to their friend, their friend feels the same, and yay, everyone is happy.
I knew the book would be a friends-to-lovers book from the start, but I don’t think that affected my rating. It’s pretty clear from the onset that Poppy feels differently for Alex than she’s purporting and it becomes more evident as the book goes on.
The book was interesting in the sense that I never knew what would happen on Poppy’s summer trips, but there weren’t any “Wow, I didn’t see that coming” moments. I do like the part toward the ending where Alex confesses that he was always scared of the potentiality of Poppy becoming bored of him; it mirrors a fear I had/have.
In the end, People We Meet on Vacation is a nice love story that does exactly what you’d expect and does it well.
🥰 Who Would Like It?
If you like romance, then you’ll probably like this book. If you’re a teenager that’s in love with your best friend and wants to fantasize about what could be, you’ll probably like this book.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Our lives went on, without each other in them. The new and strange became the familiar, the seemingly unchangeable, and now here I am, on a Friday night, staring at nothing.
You can love someone and still know the future you’d have with them wouldn’t work for you, or for them, or maybe even for both of you.
Tomorrow we will love each other a little more, and the next day, and the next day. And even on those days when one or both of us is having a hard time, we’ll be here, where we are completely known, completely accepted, by the person whose every side we love wholeheartedly.
