People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Hello! How’ve you been? These are the first days of March, which means winter is almost over!! It was in the mid-70s out here in Utah so that’s pretty gosh darn warm. I’m really hoping the trees in my garden are confused by this temporary warm spell and start blossoming a little earlier this year so I can actually see them before heading back to California! Anyways, speaking of warmer weather, this is a review on the most popular romance book of 2021 per Goodreads, a tall order! I used to read a lot of romance back in middle/high school (a lot of YA tends to have hefty amounts of romance in it so I was led down that road early on) but I’ve pretty much stopped in recent years. I took a stab at some popular ones like Red, White & Royal Blue and The Kiss Quotient last year but didn’t end up finishing either. I can’t quite put my finger on why these don’t hold the same appeal they used to but it definitely has something to do with the characters. Maybe I just can’t get into it, the overthinking, analytical, romance-focused plots. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have finished this book if I hadn’t already planned to read the top three romance books. It’s not that they’re bad… I kind of just lose interest and don’t really feel compelled to finish it. But that’s not to say I wasted my time finishing this book (or even other romance novels)! There were definitely a few interesting points in here that we’ll get into. But the basic premise is a little too…basic. We have our girl Poppy, a very outgoing, short and overall quirky narrator. Then we have her best friend, stoic and extremely handsome Alex. They met in college 12 years ago and every year since then have gone a summer vacation together until 2 years ago when something happened in Croatia and the two haven’t spoken since then. But this is the year Poppy decides to reconnect with Alex and try to salvage their friendship and what better way then going on a summer vacation together! If you think you know where this is going based on the synopsis, you’re 100% correct.

“Alex and I are not for each other. There might be love and attraction and history, but that just means there’s more to lose if we try to take this friendship into a place it doesn’t belong.”

ALRIGHTY, there it is, the crux of the problem, a tale as old as time some might say. Alex is a neat freak, probably borderline OCD and extremely fitness, health and wellness focused. Basically, he’s your most hardcore, dedicated and fitness nut suburban dad (minus the kids) a character can be. And he’s the total opposite of Poppy who’s messy, loud, extremely short (why must all the quirky interesting characters be short with wild curly hair and colorful wardrobes?), hasn’t quite figured out her life yet at 30 but has her dream job as a travel blogger at a large company and gets paid to vacation in beautiful locations. They’re both from a small town in Ohio, which Poppy hated and escaped to NYC, while Alex purposefully has gone back to and currently lives close to home. If nothing, the living choices of these two kind of encompass their characters (and there’s a lot in the book on the idea of living willingly in Ohio versus escaping it). But opposites attract right? Right. Poppy and Alex are CLEARLY attracted to each other and their relationship stays strong through their respective multiple significant others. And there’s always the hint that their significant others aren’t crazy about their best friend relationship (I WONDER WHY). I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think guys and girls can totally be just platonic friends. But Poppy says multiple times that there’s that 5-15% that’s the what if with Alex and then a few years into their friendship she realizes she’s in love with Alex. So there’s that. This isn’t one of your platonic relationships by far. But both her and Alex keep pretending it is, so that’s where we get the few hundred pages of drama because if they both just admitted that they’re mutually in love with each other where would the intrigue be!

“I would rather have one tiny sliver of him forever than have all of him for just a moment and know I’d have to relinquish all of it when we were through. I could lose Alex. I couldn’t. And so this is good, this peaceful, sparkless dance. This sparkless trip.”

I get it, I really do. Sometimes when you’re really close to someone, you don’t want to take the relationship somewhere that it can’t recover from, mainly from friends to something more. Because that involves commitment and exclusivity, and in many cases, disappointment and failure. But I also think it’s super unfair that Alex and Poppy have cocooned themselves in this platonic narrative while stringing along for, in Alex’s case almost a decade, years other people. We get the idea that they truly are in love with their other significant others BUT it’s not comparable to the relationship between Poppy and Alex. I mean, Alex gets a vasectomy because Poppy has a pregnancy scare on one of their vacations (not caused by him) but he’s dating Sarah (the girl he’s on and off with FOR A DECADE) at the time and doesn’t even think to tell her until he’s already done it. That’s pretty wild if you ask me. And since this whole book is from Poppy’s perspective, we don’t learn all these things Alex has been doing for the last 12 years for Poppy (like looking up jobs and apartments in NYC in the two years they didn’t talk just in case). But if anything, I must say that 12 years is definitely a commendably long time to maintain a friendship, especially since they live so far away from each other and sometimes only see each other once a year on their summer vacation. Now that’s commitment!

“Once your best friend is someone else’s boyfriend, the boundaries between what you can and can’t say get a whole lot firmer.”

Okay there were a few points in this book that really did resonate with me. Now that I’m done griping about how cliche it was, let’s briefly get into some topics that I did find relatable! First, oof, the quote above, way tooooo relatable. I had a lot of guy friends in college and man did every single one of them disappear when they got a girlfriend. And oddly enough, most of their girlfriends did NOT like me. I used to be slightly offended by this, I mean, I haven’t even met some of them or the ones I did, I thought we were chill. But now after having complained a hundred times about this, I see why this makes sense. I mean if you’re really good friends and just have so much in common why don’t you just date huh?! Well, there’s a lot of other factors thank you very much, but it makes sense to me so I kind of just prepare to lose a friend (mostly it’s temporary anyways and they come moseying back into my life when they’re single pringles again) when they get into a relationship (and let’s not be sexist, I think this works both ways but I haven’t really had an issue with my girl friends’ boyfriends up til now). It kind of sucks how the world just sort of inevitably works like this but as I always like to say, it is what it is!

“Apparently the completion of long-term goals often leads to depression. It’s the journey, not the destination, babe, and whatever the fuck else those throw pillows say.”

Another interesting point to me was Poppy’s dissatisfaction with her life that first kicks off this last vacation. She finally has everything she wanted when she was in high school. She got out of Ohio and live in New York City, the polar opposite of a small town. And she has her dream job of being paid to travel. She gets to live exorbitantly and experience truly incredible situations because her company is a very prestigious travel magazine (think how popular social media influencers are given VIP treatment in exchange for publicity). And she doesn’t understand why she feels so unsatisfied. Obviously because this is a romance, it goes back to Alex. But asides from that, the point of not being happy even if you think you finally everything want is a tale as old as time. It’s like binging a long tv show, when it’s over, your life feels empty for a second (until you find a new show) and you wonder what you can possibly do to fill the void. It really IS the journey huh. We always need to be moving towards something but maybe we don’t ALWAYS need to be going somewhere. Easier said than done of course but I think we’d all enjoy life a little more if we just decide to be happy wherever we are, whether we’re on a journey, reached our destination, or still looking at the map!

“I’m on vacation. Vacations always end. It’s the very fact that it’s finite that makes traveling special. You could move to any one of those destinations you loved in small doses, and it wouldn’t be the spellbinding, life-altering seven days you spent there as a guest, letting a place into your heart fully, letting it change you.”

To sum it up, I think this was a good book but nothing special. I thought the most popular romance book would be a little more… thought-provoking? complicated? I don’t know but I doubt that the other books in this category will be worse (or better) than this one. Solid 3/5. It was a nice little vacation though from any heavier reading. It really is the kind of book you take on vacation with you for some light reading, maybe at the beach or poolside lol. Since this was the first romance book I’ve read completely in years, I enjoyed it. But I’ll keep it at small doses, just like Poppy does for vacations, or I think I’d lose my mind under soulmates, it’s-always-been-you, enemies to lovers, etc. tropes!