tl;dr the summer friends-to-lovers romance of your dreams - read immediately
Premise
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?
Rating
5/5 stars
Review
This review may or may not get very personal
There's something about this book that just hit a little bit too close to home. I didn't think it would make me this emotional (I cried like five times), but I see so much of myself in Poppy and that feeling of being an outsider in your own life -- feeling lonely, feeling without purpose, running away and almost feeling stuck -- is something that I resonate very deeply with.
Add that with the fact that I have a relationship very similar to Alex and Poppy's (sans being madly in love with each other) in real life and you can probably understand why this book had me in my feels so much. The flashbacks where Poppy and Alex were with different people, where Poppy would rather have a single part of Alex forever than ever be without him, where Poppy and Alex were both so plagued with the fear of losing the other that they just stayed still. but then they still found their way back to each other.
I think it might be the feeling of someone you connect so closely with finding the missing piece in their life, but knowing that you still haven't found yours yet. Maybe I should take a vacation.
And of course, this is a friends to lovers romance with multiple timelines, so it was already bound to be a favorite.
Read this book. You won't regret it.
Other Info
Standalone
18+
CW: death of loved one (off-page, in the past)
Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/People-Meet-Vacation-Emily-Henry/dp/1984806750
Would I Recommend?
Absolutely. This is the perfect summer read.
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