Book Review: You and Me on Vacation
10/04/2021
Book Review | You and Me On Vacation by Emily Henry
I loved Emily Henry’s debut adult fiction book Beach Read last year, so I was delighted when her publishers sent me an advanced Netgalley copy of her new one! You and Me on Vacation (or The People You Meet on Vacation in the US) is another compelling romance novel, this time set over the course of twelve different summer vacations taken by Poppy and Alex.
The novel is narrated by Poppy, who is an absolute delight of a character, witty, silly and full of lovely little human insecurities. She meets Alex at university and, after a dodgy first encounter, they become best friends. When their first joint summer vacation is a resounding success, they commit to taking a trip together each Summer. After they leave college, Poppy skips town as soon as possible to work in New York City as a travel writer while Alex stays in their hometown in Ohio to work as a teacher at their high school. As their lives start to head in different directions, their annual trips become the one consistent opportunity they have to reconnect.
Alex is also a pretty unique character. He’s a bit of a slow burn and it takes a while for his personality to come through. When it does though it’s worth the wait, his backstory arcing out to impact his decisions and actions in clear and believable ways. However it felt like a fairly brave choice for a romance novel where typically the reader wants to also yearn after the romantic interest. In Beach Read for example, Gus is described as handsome from the off, even though he’s unfriendly, so setting up his attraction for both the novel’s female protagonist and the reader. Conversely, in You and Me On Vacation, nothing made Alex stand out to me as a particularly exciting, well-suited or sexy prospect. so there wasn’t that pulsing excitement for me to want the two of them to end up together. It’s testament to Henry’s writing that, by the end of the novel, I was absolutely rooting for the two of them.
The long term friends set-up is not a trope I come across regularly in the romance novels I read (I’m not sure if it is a popular trope at all as I don’t read tons of romance) but it was a refreshing shake up from storylines featuring sickly sweet meet-cutes or instantaneous explosive lust at first sight type things! On a personal level, my husband and I were acquaintances and then friends for many years before we got together, so there’s that little joy of seeing us reflected a little bit in a love story!
I think I can now safely say I’m an Emily Henry fan. Her writing is smart and incisive so her love stories never become cloyingly sweet or overly predictable. There was the odd thing that I found a little distracting in this novel, in particular I thought that at points the characters started to create more difficulties for themselves which I found a little irritating and took away from my enjoyment. Overall though this is another delightful read from Henry and I'll wait as patiently as possible for the next one!
Publication Date: 08/07/2021 | Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin for an advanced e-copy