25 pages and gave up
Finished ( )

This is it. This is the one. Emily Henry, we have finally clicked. I've always found her novels a little too literary and very good but I have to remind myself to finish them. Not this one. This one was UNGH. My chest felt too small to contain all the emotions.

Cleverly plotted, and I loved that this was such a growing story and a finding your place story as well as the most delicious, delectable romance. ( )

If you feel like an effortless romance with adorable main characters who have crazy levels of chemistry then this is the book for you. Emily Henry writes such funny and relatable characters that you can't help but fall in love with. Alex and Poppy are best friends whose annual holidays are a great source of joy but simmering underneath is always the big 'what if'. The story jumps back and forth in time as we learn more about why these friends haven't spoken for two long years. A perfect lazy weekend read.

CW: sexual content ( )

I think the author is trying to prove her claim from the last book she wrote about how romance books are really just literary fiction novels with a happy ending. I really didn’t like this aspect of the last book and here i think it resulted in an book that just drags on way too fucking long. After this book I can easily say that I never want to read another flashback sequence again. These pointless flashbacks really ruined the pacing of the book and overall didn’t really add anything to the book that couldn’t have been dealt with in the current timeline. It’s just a bit much.

I would say that this could be qualified as literary fiction but it just wouldn’t be very good because there isn’t really much meaning besides for the romance aspects.

Better than the last but still a bit tedious. ( )

⭐️⭐️💫 /5
🌶 /4 (some sex scenes but nothing at all explicit)

This story is the extremely slow burn friends-to-lovers romance of Poppy & Alex. Friends since college, these two spend over a decade becoming best friends and spending at least a week together a year on a vacation.

During that time we slowly learn that they’ve been having feelings of more than friendship for years, but that they never acted on them. They were too afraid to ruin the friendship and bond they had formed by complicating things with more complex feelings.

This is where the story lost me a bit. When you have friends to lovers stories where one of them falls for the other and the other one is clueless, it’s actually believable. Dumb, but believable. Because when the lightbulb finally goes on…. things usually change and we get our HEA.

While this version is also believable, it’s painful. Painful that they went 12 YEARS, happy to just squash their own feelings instead of taking a risk to gain everything they want. Painful that they couldn’t be honest with themselves. Painful that they each found other people to love to avoid loving each other too much. Painful that they hurt those people in the process because it was never the RIGHT love, the one they actually wanted.

Yes we get an HEA in this one. They FINALLY take the time to look inside themselves at what they’re so afraid of and realize it’s scarier to never have the person you truly want than it is to risk it all to find out.

I love Emily’s writing and had so many lines that I marked, jokes that I enjoyed. But in the end, while I’m happy Poppy & Alex finally got out of their own ways to be happy together, the level of miscommunication and bad assumptions that ruled their lives for too much of this book just annoyed more than entertained me.

This was my second Emily Henry book and after LOVING Book Lovers I was disappointed to enjoy this so much less. The writing was still great, and there were a lot of amazing quotes and points. It was just the relationship dynamic that pained me…. Which is the entire point of the book 😬Hopefully Beach Read redeems her for me 😂

Note: I own the US and UK covers of this, and I prefer the UK title of You and Me on Vacation over the US title of People We Meet on Vacation. The UK title is more true to the story. ( )