People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry Published by Penguin on May 11, 2021
Genres: Fiction / Romance / Contemporary, Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy, Fiction / Women
Pages: 400
Format: eBook
Source: Library
StoryGraph
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?
This is actually the lowest rated Emily Henry book I’ve read. I’m a little shocked that I did rate it so low but here we are.
I was really into the book at the beginning. I thought it was a fun and sweet novel, but after the first few chapters I knew that Poppy and Alex would get together at the end, and I wasn’t here for that. The relationship between the two of them felt more platonic than anything else. It actually felt really cringe reading them kiss or even having sex. I just never bought into the romantic chemistry between Poppy and Alex.
I thought it would be something major that happened in Croatia between Poppy and Alex that made them not talk for two years. No! It was miscommunication. And don’t come at me that miscommunication happens in real life. Yes, it does. But after cheating on their respective partners and having a baby scare, I feel like they should have a better grasp on communication. Speaking of cheating, that’s where this falls apart for me. I actually think these two belong together (not that I think they’ll last). Cheating on their respective partners when they want to be together is wrong and messed up. Break up with your significant other before getting together with someone else.
Poppy and Alex are described as being complete opposites, Alex is a button up and control freak, while Poppy is messy and chaotic. I’m not saying that people on opposite ends can’t work well together but considering that they had their entire friendship fall apart due to miscommunication, I’m not holding out hope of them being able to work things out when problems arise.
The pacing of the book was pretty slow too, after a while, I was mostly skimming through the past summer chapters. Those could’ve been narrowed down to a handful of years to understand their relationship up to the present and the conflicts in Italy and Croatia.
I guess the only positive thing I can bring up is that the book is still well-written. As a friend said when I asked them about it, it was a pretty forgettable novel.
This is my least favorite Emily Henry, too. I just didn’t like Poppy very much, she seemed very self-absorbed. I enjoyed the traveling aspect, but it was a lot to keep track of.
I’m glad I’m not alone 😂