Beach Read by Emily Henry

Format: Kindle
Read: March 2024

My relationship with Emily Henry books has been a rollercoaster so far. I absolutely loved Book Lovers, yet I hated You And Me On Vacation so much I had to call it a DNF at 20%! As I was perusing reviews it emerged that they does seems to be a division amongst her readers – there is a pattern of either loving Book Lovers or You and Me On Vacation, but rarely both. This makes sense to me because Book Lovers subverts some of the most annoying tropes of the rom-com genre, while You And Me On Vacation leans heavily into them. I also kept seeing in recommendations that if you did like Book Lovers you’d probably like Beach Read, and if you didn’t like You And Me On Vacation definitely stay well away from Happy Place!

This in mind, I was excited when Beach Read sprang up on a kindle deal! And it hit right at the time where I was needing a little light reading lift for some escapism. I am happy to report that recommendations hold up – I did really enjoy Beach Read, in fact I couldn’t put it down and read it in 3 days!

I didn’t love it as much as Book Lovers – it definitely has some niggles – but overall I thought it was great!

My favourite thing about it is not actually the romance aspect, I loved how it was a little look behind the curtain of a writers life and the writing process. Where Book Lovers‘s characters were editors, in Beach Read they are writers. I really loved the little nuggets about writing, drafting and researching and how ideas develop. I actually found this quite inspiring!

I already have too many hobbies, I am not going to attempt to write fiction again any time soon (I’ve had many failed attempts at this in my younger years!) but I still think somewhere lurking within me is the desire to try again one day. Especially now I make an effort to document what I read and what I do and do not respond to in books. They always say you should write the book you want to read, after all!

I liked main character January, despite her very rom-commy name she felt like a complete person with shades of light and dark. Her struggles with her fathers death and revelations about his secret life do feel relatable.

I enjoyed most of the humour, though some of the “cute banter” did verge into cringe for me occasionally… I’m quite sensitive to that kind of thing! (People just don’t talk like that! …And if they did, I’d hate them!)

On the other hand, one of my niggles with this book is that love interest Gus was rather vaguely drawn. I didn’t find him to be much more than the stereotypical “grumpy hot guy with messy hair” and his major flaw is his inability to communicate… which, as you’ll know if you have read any other reviews of mine, is one of my least favourite things in romance.

The middle conflict of the books does rely on miscommunication but actually in this case I think, for the most part, the reasons were explained well enough that it didn’t bother me too much. I did feel like I understood why, and often January would end up blurting out a confrontation anyway so generally this never dragged on too much.

There are a couple of notable exceptions though – there are two points in the book where I think Gus’ lack of communication does go into dickish rude behaviour and I didn’t feel like it made sense for him to act that way, particular based on character growth that had been happening. All you have to do is a send a little reassurance text, or say “I’m sorry this phone call is from X and I need to deal with X.”

This love story does not end with a Happily Ever After which is definitely thematically appropriate, instead it is a Happy For Now which personally I prefer. Happily Ever After only works for me if I believed the relationship and the characters have the maturity to work on a long term partnership. This romance did not have me completely convinced of that, so I’m glad the author made that choice! They might be in a good spot now but they both definitely have some work to do.

So now I am 2 for 3 with Emily Henry. I am going to keep Happy Place as a hard pass, but I’ll keep an eye out for other books of hers that are on the Book Lovers & Beach Read side of the fence.