Blog Tour Stop: Emily Henry's PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION.

​Thanks for being here! I'm excited to be part of the blog tour for Emily Henry's People We Meet on Vacation, out today! Read ahead for the Synopsis, My Review, and About the Author.

A big thanks to Berkley for gifting me a complimentary copy of the ARC and inviting me to be part of the tour; all opinions provided are my own. ​

SYNOPSIS

​Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Newsweek ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ BookPage ∙ BookBub ∙ Betches ∙ SheReads ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ and more!
 
Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.
 
From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations. 
 
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?

MY REVIEW 

I knew Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation would be a beautifully written way of messing with my heart.

Poppy Wright & Alex Nilsen are opposites attract unlikely best friends who have spent almost every year since college going on one major summer trip together. But two years ago, in Croatia, something happened that caused a divide between them, & they haven’t spoken since.

After prompting, Poppy realizes she can trace her “last” happy moment to being w/ him, so she reconnects & asks him to go on a trip to Palm Springs. She hopes that she’ll be able to find her lost travel-journalist mojo & rekindle a beloved friendship she’s missed.

But of course even when he says yes it’s all more complicated than that.

There’s so much to love about PWM: Alex is really nice & dependable & wear khakis & is also a secret weirdo, but only around Poppy. Their relationship is built on inside jokes & moments when they’re only themselves around each other. On tenderness & respect & the more than 1, less than 15% of Poppy’s feelings that are romantic in nature. Yeah right . It’s an ache & a tenderness to see all of the ways they’ve been in love for so long.

Their HEA, told from present day & a series of flashbacks, is hard won, & Henry really builds up that tension, showing how they both wanted (want??) different lives. But maybe there’s some overlap. I read each chapter with bated breath, frequently checking how long the chapters were because I wanted to move ahead in the present day story & get them to kissing .

By the end, I felt assured that they really knew each other, that figuring things out might not be the easiest thing in the world but the only thing for people who love each other so much.

Funny, emotionally lovely & also difficult for someone like me , this book is poignant & as beautiful as I thought it would be. I hope that Alex & Poppy are enjoying a (vaccinated) summer trip soon.

5 ⭐️. Out today!

CW:

Poppy was bullied in high school; classmates lied about her sexual history & gave her the name Porny Poppy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author photo by Devyn Glista St. Blanc Studios

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Emily Henry writes stories about love and family for both teens and adults. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.

Thanks for joining me on my stop! To see more of my bookish adventures, you can follow me here.