People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Title: People We Meet on Vacation

Author: Emily Henry

Publisher: Berkley

Genre: Contemporary

First Publication: 2021

Language: English

Book Summary: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

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?

Book Review: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Sometimes you pick up a romance novel hoping for a bit of beachy escapism, only to find yourself utterly blindsided by its disarming emotional potency. That’s the experience I had devouring Emily Henry’s utterly charming novel People We Meet on Vacation—a book I expected to be a lighthearted frolic with some chuckle-worthy banter, but which ultimately had me fiercely hugging the pages and lamenting my own lack of an enduring will-they-won’t-they bestie.

From those opening chapters chronicling the fateful meeting of Poppy and Alex during a college rideshare gone awry, you know you’re in for one of those rare romances grounded in an unshakably real-feeling emotional cadence. There’s an authenticity to their sparkling back-and-forths, their fastidiously cultivated in-jokes and secrets, that feels less like fictional constructs and more like eavesdropping on the teasing, know-you-to-the-bone intimacy of actual close friends.

Rather than settling into the usual love-hate-love courtship choreography, Henry uses those early sections to establish a different kind of central romance—one between Poppy and Alex’s very souls, their spirits crackling with the electricity of a lifelong connection that transcends shallow attraction. You find yourself instantly invested in their dynamic, not because you’re thirstily rooting for them to rip each other’s clothes off, but because they feel like two fully-fleshed individuals who’ve built an entire commune around their mutual weirdness.

Which, of course, only makes the pangs of longing land that much heavier once Henry flashes us forward nearly a decade into their tradition of taking delightfully random vacations together each summer. As Poppy and Alex repeatedly contort themselves into extremely relatable pretzels of repression to keep their physical and romantic tensions bottled up year after year, the vicarious sting of their near-misses becomes almost unbearable.

It certainly doesn’t help matters that Henry is a master of sensual atmospheric detailing, vividly transporting you into the lush settings of each annual destination. From the cool Croatian shorelines to the neon-kissed streets of Vancouver to the rustic splendor of the American Southwest, the novel positively thrums with transportive wanderlust in a way that’ll have you desperately pawing at Instagram for vicarious hits of similar escape.

Amidst that rich backdrop of escapism, Poppy and Alex’s chemistry only grows more potent – and more agonizing to witness—as forever observers shut out from their magic bubble of gentle ribbing and unspoken subtext. We’re treated to inside glimpses of their cherished rituals, the unique language of their codependent attachment, and the way their lives seem to revolve around one another even when they’re worlds apart.

At a certain point, the push-pull of their respective commitment phobias and self-sabotage loops you into a kind of emotional paradox—simultaneously rooting for them to finally unmask their undying love for each other, while also empathizing with their anguished reticence to shatter the very foundations of their found family. After all, which one of us hasn’t feared that voicing certain feelings might irreparably untether our most precious platonic dynamics?

And that’s what really makes People We Meet on Vacation such a fascinating roller coaster of a read. Even as Henry builds toward those magnetic, shiver-inducing crescendos of cathartic romantic payoff, she’s burrowing into the deeper universalities of intense cross-gender friendships in a way few rom-coms have dared to excavate so thoroughly.

This is a book very much attuned to the complex neuroses, the engulfing comfort zones of co-dependency, and the beauty and terror of discovering your life’s deepest imprint through another soul’s intimate recognition of yours. Henry writes with such tenderness about the profundity of stumbling upon those exceedingly rare humans who completely “get” you—and just how petrifying that awareness can feel once romantic feelings start to distort those sacred, familial planes.

So while you’re likely to come away from this novel with a renewed yearning to book a solo plane ticket and rekindle your own appetite for life’s spontaneous joys and breathtaking vistas, the core souvenir you’ll be taking with you is Henry’s incisively relatable excavation of how relationships can act as identities unto themselves. Her palpable empathy for the existential resets and growing pangs that come with uprooting your emotional home base from a lifelong companion is precisely what lends the story’s inevitable romantic payoff its sustaining resonance.

Make no mistake, when those final Big Awakenings and Grand Romantic Gestures do arrive in all their transcendent glory, they positively crackle with a hard-won depth of feeling. Henry proves herself a master of the exquisitely rendered meet-cute, the piercingly poignant falling-in-love flashback, and the wobbly grandeur of risk-taking intimacy after years behind defensive barriers.

But as swoonworthy and irresistibly rousing as those climaxes prove to be, the real magic of People We Meet on Vacation lies in its holistic journey toward that summit of self-actualization—the awkwardness, the tiny epiphanies, the defiant maintaining of habits and traditions, and inside jokes in the face of those inevitable drifts. It’s a novel about finding the courage to preserve the most transcendent parts of yourself and your essential bonds, even as life inevitably distorts and reshapes your trajectories.

So while People We Meet on Vacation will most certainly give you a severe case of intermittent wanderlust and an aching hunger for life’s spontaneous detours, be prepared for it to also lodge itself into your psyche as an unexpectedly profound meditation on the powers and pitfalls of emotional interdependence. Henry deals in a brand of thoughtful, layered romantic storytelling that’ll have you lamenting your own inability to freeze certain relationships in perpetual stasis while also reevaluating what it might mean to take the plunge and reimagine those intimacies on entirely new trajectories.

It’s a sumptuous, hopelessly beguiling character study of connection in all its complicated, transient, and permanently rumpled glory. Just make sure to clear your calendar before picking it up, as you’re sure to burn through its immaculately-rendered pages in one fatefully indulgent, swoon-struck bender.