{Release Day Review} People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (@BerkleyPub @BerkleyRomance)

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?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations

​Poppy Wright has always been a restless soul.  She wanted to experience everything the world had to offer. As long as it was far, far away from her hometown of Linfield, Ohio.
 
So as fate would have it, on her very first day of university, she meets the boy who is not only going to show her what the word “home” really means – he’s also going to redefine everything she knows about love.

​“You know, my therapist says—”
“Your mom,” I say.
“She was being a therapist when she said this,” Rachel argues, by which I know she means, Sandra Krohn was being decidedly Dr. Sandra Krohn, in the same way that Rachel is sometimes decidedly Art School Rachel, not that Rachel was actually in a therapy session. Beg as Rachel might, her mother refuses to treat Rachel as a patient. Rachel, however, refuses to see anyone else, and so they remain at an impasse.
“Anyway,” Rachel continues, “she told me that sometimes, when you lose your happiness, it’s best to look for it the same way you’d look for anything else.”
“By groaning and hurling couch cushions around?” I guess.
“By retracing your steps,” Rachel says. “So, Poppy, all you have to do is think back and ask yourself, when was the last time you were truly happy?”
The problem is, I don’t have to think back. Not at all.
I know right away when I was last truly happy.
Two years ago, in Croatia, with Alex Nilsen.

​Alex Nilsen has been painfully responsible from a very young age.  After losing his mother, he stepped in as the caregiver for both his distraught father and his younger siblings.
 
His life is planned. Go to college. Come back to Linfield.  Get a job. Have a family. Live happily ever after. He never counted on a best friend like Poppy - with her outlandish clothes and ceaseless wanderlust – to wedge herself so deep in his heart that he can’t imagine his life without her.
 
So when the line of friendship crosses into something much more, will they risk everything to make love last long after vacation is over?

And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down.
We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it.
But this, this is the moment I first think it.
I am in love with you.
The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away.
But there are points in the center of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.

I’ve been a raving fan of Emily Henry ever since being swept away by A Million Junes. With each subsequent new release, I was always left thinking that there was no way that she could top it.  Well, with People We Meet on Vacation, she has proved me wrong in the very best way!
 
Her characters are uniquely complex. Poppy shines with her wicked sense of humor and heartbreaking insecurity.  While Alex smolders with his quiet strength and longing.  They made me giggle, made me swoon and made me never want to visit Palm Springs in the summer.
 
​It’s the vacation that I never wanted to end because I loved every moment of it...