Review: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.

Prologue

Why People We Meet On Vacation?

I originally planned on reading People We Meet On Vacation two years ago on my vacation to Halifax. I thought it would be funny and cute to read a book with this name while on vacation. I even bought a physical copy of the book and took it with me to Halifax. I did not get around to reading the book on that trip and I gave away the physical copy of the book as a gift to someone I met in Halifax.

Fast forward two years and I am on a five and a half hour flight to Vancouver for my vacation this year and I was looking for a book to read that was ideal for reading on a flight. The book I had originally planned to read didn’t quite suit my tastes and so I decided to read the copy of People We Meet On Vacation that was sitting on my Kobo ebook reader.

I ended up reading the entirety of the book on that flight. As such, the review for this book will be a little different compared to my other book reviews. Not only am I writing this review more than a week after I finished reading the book, I also don’t have any of my usual notes for the book since I didn’t take any while reading the book on the plane. So this will be more “off the cuff” than my usual style.

This is my first time reading anything my Emily Henry. I read an ebook edition of the book (ISBN/UID – 9781984806765) published by Berkley in May 2021.

Let’s get into it.

The Book

People We Meet On Vacation like Emily Henry’s other novels is a contemporary romance novel. I have wanted to read an Emily Henry novel for a while. As I started dipping my toes into the waters of contemporary romance fiction I knew I was going to read one of her books at some point—her books are immensely popular and as with authors/books that are this popular I was very curious about what Emily’s books are like.

This novel follows the story of two best friends—Alex and Poppy who became friends over the course of one car share in college and have remained friends ever since. They are two very different people as the description of the book makes clear and they live far apart from each other with the exception of their yearly week long vacation ritual where they go on vacation together.

The story is told from Poppy’s perspective and there are timeline shifts—the “present” timeline of Alex and Poppy’s latest vacation together and then the various previous trips they have taken together over the last decade. This is the primary method of character development that this book employs and over the course of reading about Alex and Poppy’s interactions during these trips, I got a better sense of what their relationship dynamic was like.

I liked both Alex and Poppy a fair bit. I thought each of their personality quirks were charming and the banter between them was genuinely quite funny and made me laugh out loud at multiple points during the book. There is a strong undercurrent of yearning throughout this book and it is especially apparent from the way Poppy thinks about Alex throughout the book—and as someone who enjoys yearning in romance novels, I very much enjoyed this aspect of the book.

As far as romance fiction tropes are concerned People We Meet On Vacation is very much a friends-to-lovers story at its heart. It is also massively slow burn—the vast majority of the novel is spent on showing us the development of Alex and Poppy’s friendship over the course of their vacations together and the payoff comes in the last quarter of the novel. This is very much the ideal romance novel for folks like myself who enjoy a slow burn friends-to-lovers romance.

Concluding Thoughts

I very much enjoyed my time reading People We Meet On Vacation. Reading this book on a flight to my vacation destination felt like the perfect time to read this book. This is the first time I have read a book on a flight and I am glad that it was a book that I absolutely devoured in one sitting. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the book as much if I had read it in a different set of circumstances, it was the right book at the right time.

It was an interesting challenge to rely entirely on my memory and the few annotations I have saved in my ebook reader as the basis for writing this review. It definitely makes for a more casual style of review and perhaps that is appropriate for the setting I read this book in. In some ways, this is more a review of the specific set of circumstances that I read this book in than the book itself but this is a case where those two things are truly inseparable from each other.

I am open to reading Emily Henry’s other novels whenever my mood calls for more contemporary romance. I think I now understand why her novels are so popular especially if her other novels are as fun as this one is.

That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.

Thank you for reading this blog post. Please consider supporting my writing work through Patreon. Additionally, please share this post on your socials and/or with your friends. It really helps! If you have any thoughts/feedback/thoughtful criticism to share, feel free to use the handy contact me page to send that to me.