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A review by emfass
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Things I liked:
-I absolutely adored Poppy and Alex. They were wonderful characters, and I loved taking our time getting to know them and how their relationship formed and grew.
-I loooove a good friends-to-lovers story, it is my favorite trope. These two had such a deep and abiding friendship, and I loved how they loved each other unconditionally, platonically and in pining for each other.
-Excellent banter. Truly wonderful dialogue.
-Characters going to therapy to work on their shit!
-Time slip - I really like stories told in time slip, I'm finding. I did have a little trouble keeping all the stories from the past straight, perhaps because of the way my brain processes, combined with the fact that there were so many of them and most of them took place while traveling (even though it was to different locations), as did the "present" timeline.
-Emily Henry wrote to a lot of the emotional struggles millennials have in just pretending to adult but being convinced everyone else has it together, feelings of loneliness and longing and confusion over what to do with your life and where you want to be in the world.
-Vasectomy portrayal!!! I had never seen this portrayed in a book before and it just immediately made Alex a king among men
Things that fell short for me:
-Croatia was so built up throughout the book as The Event That Ended Their Friendship, and then I thought what happened was very anticlimactic. I didn't believe the ten-year friendship she'd portrayed would have ended after that. Emily Henry came and visited the Bad Bitch Book Club and said it wasn't so much Croatia as what happened in Tuscany, which I get, but then that wasn't what was built up in the 90% of the book before we get to that point; we kept hearing Croatia as the turning point.
-I struggled to buy that these two were so incompatible as to just pine for each other for 10 years but not do anything about it, since they get along so well when they're in person together. JenReadsRomance's review named with succinct clarity a big aspect of this, which is that there has to be buy-in for the question of why two characters can't be together right now, and if the answer isn't convincing, you lose something crucial to the storytelling.
-This is absolutely a personal preference thing, but I hate when The Big Declaration Of Love happens in front of other people in public. *insert laughing emoji* *insert nope emoji*
-Within Poppy's declaration of love, there were a lot of things that made me go, "Huh??" as her trying to explain herself to him. I'm mainly thinking of her "I love travel 'cause I love meeting other people in those places." I mean, that had been portrayed throughout their trips, but...we never had any indication from Poppy's inner monologue that that was having a profound impact on her?? Most of what we got was her thinking about Alex. So I found that part confusing and out of left field.
I liked Beach Read more than I liked People You Meet On Vacation, but this one was pretty great too.
Read for Bad Bitch Book Club's/Friends to Lovers Podcast's 2021 Romance Challenge.
-I absolutely adored Poppy and Alex. They were wonderful characters, and I loved taking our time getting to know them and how their relationship formed and grew.
-I loooove a good friends-to-lovers story, it is my favorite trope. These two had such a deep and abiding friendship, and I loved how they loved each other unconditionally, platonically and in pining for each other.
-Excellent banter. Truly wonderful dialogue.
-Characters going to therapy to work on their shit!
-Time slip - I really like stories told in time slip, I'm finding. I did have a little trouble keeping all the stories from the past straight, perhaps because of the way my brain processes, combined with the fact that there were so many of them and most of them took place while traveling (even though it was to different locations), as did the "present" timeline.
-Emily Henry wrote to a lot of the emotional struggles millennials have in just pretending to adult but being convinced everyone else has it together, feelings of loneliness and longing and confusion over what to do with your life and where you want to be in the world.
Things that fell short for me:
-I struggled to buy that these two were so incompatible as to just pine for each other for 10 years but not do anything about it, since they get along so well when they're in person together. JenReadsRomance's review named with succinct clarity a big aspect of this, which is that there has to be buy-in for the question of why two characters can't be together right now, and if the answer isn't convincing, you lose something crucial to the storytelling.
-This is absolutely a personal preference thing, but I hate when The Big Declaration Of Love happens in front of other people in public. *insert laughing emoji* *insert nope emoji*
-Within Poppy's declaration of love, there were a lot of things that made me go, "Huh??" as her trying to explain herself to him. I'm mainly thinking of her "I love travel 'cause I love meeting other people in those places." I mean, that had been portrayed throughout their trips, but...we never had any indication from Poppy's inner monologue that that was having a profound impact on her?? Most of what we got was her thinking about Alex. So I found that part confusing and out of left field.
I liked Beach Read more than I liked People You Meet On Vacation, but this one was pretty great too.
Read for Bad Bitch Book Club's/Friends to Lovers Podcast's 2021 Romance Challenge.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal death, Bullying, Death of parent, Grief, and Sexual content
Minor: Drug use and Medical content
Alex's mother died from complications after giving birth to his younger brother