Book Review: People We Meet on Vacation
Aug. 21st, 2021 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer“Your style is, like, 1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst doling out baguettes.”
After all this World War I reading, I needed something light, and because I’d enjoyed Emily Henry’s Beach Read so much, I turned to her new book People We Meet on Vacation.
Just what the doctor ordered! The conceit of the book is that Poppy and her best friend Alex have been going on a summer trip every year for the past twelve years… except Something Went Wrong on their trip to Croatia two years ago, and they’ve barely talked since. So not only do we get the present day trip where they try to reconnect, but also snippets from nearly a dozen vacations past, too.
This did fan the flames of my unappeasable wanderlust, but such is life! Maybe when you can’t travel, the next best thing is reading books about travel?
Also, Emily Henry is just so good at capturing how millennials talk, right down to the slightly self-conscious obsession with being millennials. I particularly love the bit where Poppy is making her dinner, and thinking about how she’s going to have to make dinner for herself every day! For the rest of her life! And that’s so many dinners, it will never end, she will have to do it even when she’s got a fever of 102, because there will be no one there to do it for her…
Not sure if that is a millennial mood or just a mood that I have sometimes, but. Such a mood.
I mostly liked the romance while I was reading, but the more I think about it, the more reservations I have, because I felt VERY bad for Sarah Torval, Alex’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who moves TWICE in order to be with him, only for the relationship to keep hitting the skids because he’s secretly in love with Poppy. Not only has he not told Poppy, he hasn’t even fully admitted it to himself, probably because if he admitted it to himself he would have to either (a) tell Poppy (terrifying! I get it, man, but sometimes you gotta do the scary thing), or (b) step back from his friendship with Poppy because he’s never going to be able to do right by a romantic partner if three-quarters of his heart remains in Poppy’s keeping, or I guess (c) stop dating so he won't keep stringing along poor Sarah Torval, and accept that his destiny is simply to pine after Poppy till he dies.
Instead he just… doesn’t fully look at it, and keeps dating Sarah, and it keeps just not quite working. He swears to Poppy that it’s NOT because he was in love with her the whole time, and he DID love Sarah, just like Poppy loved the guys she dated during those twelve years she and Alex weren’t together.
The thing is, I believe this for Poppy, but not for Alex. Maybe it’s because the book is all in Poppy’s viewpoint, so we see her feelings for these other boys, but we never get an Alex-eye-view of his relationship with Sarah? But what we do see makes it look like Alex wanted to be in love with Sarah, because she was a safe choice, but wanting to be in love with someone is not the same as being in love, and he really did her pretty dirty by stringing her along for so long. Again! She moved twice for him!
It’s not that I don’t want Poppy and Alex to get together; frankly, these two dorks need to get off the dating market and stop tormenting other people with their pseudo-availability. (One of the secondary characters actually says this!) But I don’t think the book fully engages with the fact that Alex sat on his feelings for a decade, and then Alex and Poppy both stopped speaking to each other for TWO WHOLE YEARS after their first kiss in Croatia (yes, that was the Croatia Incident) - so it’s not just an Alex thing! They’re both terrible at talking to each other!
And then they spend most of their current vacation refusing to talk about the elephant in the room too. And then get together, and then break up in the airport, and then have to get together AGAIN.
They are both in therapy at the end of the book (I hear you cheering) but boy, those are some rock-bottom communication skills on both sides, I honestly have some concerns whether therapy will be sufficient.
It’s testament to the incredible charm of Poppy’s voice that I found this only mildly aggravating as I read the book. Will these two crazy kids make it? I really have no idea, but I loved watching them try.
After all this World War I reading, I needed something light, and because I’d enjoyed Emily Henry’s Beach Read so much, I turned to her new book People We Meet on Vacation.
Just what the doctor ordered! The conceit of the book is that Poppy and her best friend Alex have been going on a summer trip every year for the past twelve years… except Something Went Wrong on their trip to Croatia two years ago, and they’ve barely talked since. So not only do we get the present day trip where they try to reconnect, but also snippets from nearly a dozen vacations past, too.
This did fan the flames of my unappeasable wanderlust, but such is life! Maybe when you can’t travel, the next best thing is reading books about travel?
Also, Emily Henry is just so good at capturing how millennials talk, right down to the slightly self-conscious obsession with being millennials. I particularly love the bit where Poppy is making her dinner, and thinking about how she’s going to have to make dinner for herself every day! For the rest of her life! And that’s so many dinners, it will never end, she will have to do it even when she’s got a fever of 102, because there will be no one there to do it for her…
Not sure if that is a millennial mood or just a mood that I have sometimes, but. Such a mood.
I mostly liked the romance while I was reading, but the more I think about it, the more reservations I have, because I felt VERY bad for Sarah Torval, Alex’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who moves TWICE in order to be with him, only for the relationship to keep hitting the skids because he’s secretly in love with Poppy. Not only has he not told Poppy, he hasn’t even fully admitted it to himself, probably because if he admitted it to himself he would have to either (a) tell Poppy (terrifying! I get it, man, but sometimes you gotta do the scary thing), or (b) step back from his friendship with Poppy because he’s never going to be able to do right by a romantic partner if three-quarters of his heart remains in Poppy’s keeping, or I guess (c) stop dating so he won't keep stringing along poor Sarah Torval, and accept that his destiny is simply to pine after Poppy till he dies.
Instead he just… doesn’t fully look at it, and keeps dating Sarah, and it keeps just not quite working. He swears to Poppy that it’s NOT because he was in love with her the whole time, and he DID love Sarah, just like Poppy loved the guys she dated during those twelve years she and Alex weren’t together.
The thing is, I believe this for Poppy, but not for Alex. Maybe it’s because the book is all in Poppy’s viewpoint, so we see her feelings for these other boys, but we never get an Alex-eye-view of his relationship with Sarah? But what we do see makes it look like Alex wanted to be in love with Sarah, because she was a safe choice, but wanting to be in love with someone is not the same as being in love, and he really did her pretty dirty by stringing her along for so long. Again! She moved twice for him!
It’s not that I don’t want Poppy and Alex to get together; frankly, these two dorks need to get off the dating market and stop tormenting other people with their pseudo-availability. (One of the secondary characters actually says this!) But I don’t think the book fully engages with the fact that Alex sat on his feelings for a decade, and then Alex and Poppy both stopped speaking to each other for TWO WHOLE YEARS after their first kiss in Croatia (yes, that was the Croatia Incident) - so it’s not just an Alex thing! They’re both terrible at talking to each other!
And then they spend most of their current vacation refusing to talk about the elephant in the room too. And then get together, and then break up in the airport, and then have to get together AGAIN.
They are both in therapy at the end of the book (I hear you cheering) but boy, those are some rock-bottom communication skills on both sides, I honestly have some concerns whether therapy will be sufficient.
It’s testament to the incredible charm of Poppy’s voice that I found this only mildly aggravating as I read the book. Will these two crazy kids make it? I really have no idea, but I loved watching them try.
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Date: 2021-08-22 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-22 01:30 pm (UTC)