People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Look, I’m a sucker for a good friends-to-lovers romance, but sometimes a book just tackles this trope so damn well, I’m left a little breathless.

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry left me a little breathless.

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?

There were times when Poppy and Alex were so insanely idiotic, I just wanted to reach into the pages and shake them a little and then smoosh their faces together, because if they’d just talked, their lives together could have started so much sooner.

But idiocy aside, I loved their relationship, their deep history (revealed to us in wonderful flashback chapters of their previous summer vacations), and the way they can fall so easily back into their rhythm once reunited, despite the awkwardness of how they left things.

Plus, the slow reveals of all that Alex and Poppy have shared, and the many ways he has been showing his love for her over the years together, even when she didn’t let herself see it for what it really was. I don’t want to spoil anything, but gah, some of those gestures — a very big one in particular — just gutted me, in the best way possible.

This book had it all for me: a sweeping romance, steamy chemistry, and the escapism of a travel-centric story. People We Meet on Vacation is in stores May 11th. Thanks to Berkley for the advanced digital review copy.