Sep 9

Sep 9 Beach Read

Author: Emily Henry
Publisher: Berkley
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

TL;DR Review

Beach Read was exactly what I wanted: fun, fast, steamy, heart-wrenching, with true-to-life characters and conflicts. (Basically everything we’ve come to expect from Emily Henry!)

For you if: You like books about books and the rivals to lovers trope.

Full Review

I don’t read a ton of romance, but I’m obviously on board when it comes to Emily Henry. I’d read both Book Lovers and Happy Place already, and I was saving Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation for a day when I was really in the mood for romance. Well, that day came, I asked my romance-loving friends which one to do first, and Beach Read it was. It will come as no surprise that I found this book to be a total delight, fast and fun, but with depth — exactly what I wanted!

I swallowed this book whole in a single day (without having the audio to pull me through the physical copy, like I usually do) — so maybe this is more of a plane read than a beach read, because you’re not going to want to do anything but read it. I loved January, I loved Gus, I loved their banter and their dynamic. I loved the focus on fiction and writing and bookstores. I loved all the tertiary characters. So, so much to love.

There are many things that make Emily Henry one of the best in her genre, but what does it for me is the way she gives the central conflicts of her novels so much nuance and depth. We feel so deeply for her main characters and can’t fault either of them for the wedge that inevitably ends up between them, because it’s just like, LIFE. True, honest life that honors the reality of what’s best for each person…and then eventually finds a way for them to be together anyway.

I can’t wait for the next time I’m in the mood for this genre and get to pick up PWMOV!