Review: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Publication date: May 11th, 2021

Pages: 364

Spice: 🌶️🌶️

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?

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Review:

Poppy has everything she could ever want in her life. She has a wonderful family that she visits regularly, an amazing girl friend, a job that sends her on luxury vacations all the time, and the freedom to do anything she wants. The one issue is that there has become a canyon of space between her and her best friend that is causing her to go stir crazy. With her perfect life starting to feel dull around the edges Poppy decides to try to draw her best friend back into their customary summer vacations with the promise of her job fronting the bill. Alex reluctantly agrees and Poppy knows she has one shot to convince Alex that the last vacation they had was not the end of their friendship. They could rekindle it all and make new memories all over again. But what if what transpired can't be forgotten? And what if both are just trying to kid themselves that they could ever move past it?

I am not usually a huge fan of the friends-to-lovers trope mainly because all the budding chemistry has already been established and it's just a bunch of resisting the mutual feelings in hopes of preserving the friendship. There is really no other way to play that trope unlike others so it gets a bit stagnant for me. That may have been my entire issue with the book because as usual the writing, the characters, the overall story were all splendidly done. I noticed a few references to the characters in the first book and that was fun to see. I not know why most people suggest reading them in order. 

Poppy is such a scatterbrained mess that it was endearing. She kept getting in her own way and while she was sunshine and rainbows there was a bit of a dark cloud inside that she rarely let anyone see. The dark cloud was a lot less noticeable when her friend, Alex, was around. Their dynamic as friends only made Poppy as a character that much more of a delight. Their inside jokes that the readers were let in on were cutesy and adorable. They played off each other so well that I couldn't understand why nobody in their lives had pushed them together in the ten years they were friends. They all just sat back and watched as Alex and Poppy obliviously kept pretending to be friends while secretly loving each other. I also have no idea how neither of them got toxically jealous when the other was dating another person. Couldn't be me, couldn't be me. 

While I think People We Meet on Vacation was a cute second book for me to read by Emily Henry, I think that there were a few things that could have been improved upon as well as my own opinions on friends-to-lovers overall. This doesn't make Emily Henry any less of a must read author for me. I just hope the next one blows the other two out of the water.