Book Review: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
Publisher: ‎ Berkley
Release Date: May 11, 2021
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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?

Alex and Poppy are total opposites. Somehow it works to make them best friends but not lovers. People You Meet on Vacation aspires to answer the age-old question – can men and women ever be just friends? Sound familiar? That’s because the author was inspired by the movie When Harry Met Sally. It even starts out with Alex and Poppy getting to know each other on a road trip. However, Alex is way nicer than Harry at much more reserved.

After Alex and Poppy bond on their road trip home from college, they decide to start taking a trip together every summer – as friends. They don’t really see each other in person in between summer trips because their lives are so different. Alex becomes a high school teacher in the small town they grew up in and Poppy moves to New York City to write for a travel magazine.

Something happened on their trip two years ago and they lost touch. After all that time with no contact, Poppy convinces Alex to take another trip with her. She actually doesn’t have to try that hard to get him to agree and this is where the book lost me. I found the way they reconnected to be a forced plot point. It just doesn’t seem likely that Alex would agree to go on a trip without any discussion of their issues or catching up at all beforehand. And once they got on the trip, I couldn’t feel much chemistry between them.

For a rom-com, I thought it was lacking in com. I like romances with more humor. Maybe it was because Alex is supposed to be kind of a boring, humorless person? I’m not sure. I know this book got a lot of hype when it came out and people loved it but it was just not my cup of tea. I’m not going to write Emily Henry off just yet though. I’ve heard her other books are better so I’m going to check at least one more out. If you’re a fan, which one would you recommend?