People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy this brief spotlight.”

Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

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?

From the
New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations.

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I read Emily Henry’s YA debut, A Million Junes, around when it came out and liked it well enough. Last year, I read her adult debut, Beach Read, and both loved it and the buzz it brought to the book community. It embodied what a lot of my 2020 reading list looked like — solid, dependable, about four stars but could be five stars if it hit me at the right time. I firmly enjoy her writing. Her characters are witty enough (nothing earth shattering, but enough for an occasional laugh) and relatable.

Enter People We Meet on Vacation. At first glance, it’s not clear what the stakes are. As a whole, the total book is fine/good. It’s cute, but there’s little conflict and the overall trajectory is pretty clear considering the genre expectations of a romantic comedy. The question is essentially this: if two long time will-they-or-won’t-they best friends will finally get together?

Poppy occasionally got on my nerves for the sin of believing herself to be hilarious. There were moments when she actually was funny, and so I’m willing to let that one slide. There’s just something inherently grating to me about characters who believe themselves to be The Funny One that breaks the fourth wall for me. (Does that mean the author believes themselves to be funny too?) I’m not sure the moments I found amusing vs. the ones she meant to be amusing were the same. She had no filter, but not in a faux-edgy way; instead, she threw a bunch out, saw what stuck, and rolled with it. Most of the “no filter” people I know in reality are like that too. Overall, I liked her! She was fun and bold and not abrasive.

I could see readers finding her insufferable for the relatively plotless nature of People We Meet on Vacation. Everyone has their own problems, but part of writing in a first-person POV means that the stakes have to feel higher for the reader in order to care. Since we’re in the narrator’s head, we have to feel the intensity of their problem and Poppy’s seemed to be that she was kind of listless and bored. (Aren’t we all, at various times?!) She’s this travel writer, paid to take these lavish and decadent locations, but just feels kind of off.

While I totally respect the reflection of a common problem, the emphasis on how great her life was (“high rent apartment, amazing job, everything I wanted”) vs. her issue (“I just feel weird”) didn’t feel like enough. There didn’t seem to be any large existential crisis or conflict. Sorry Poppy, I wanted you to suffer more so I could root for you. When she talked about her problems, they felt vague and distant instead of pressing and urgent. While faint boredom is a problem in reality, I’m not sure it translated well to fiction. There had to be a little more oomph.

So what happened in the book? Two best friends, reuniting a bit awkwardly. There’s some mention of an awkward encounter in Croatia, which is the reason they haven’t spoken. Still, their reunion that led to this trip is pretty seamless, so no issues there. On their trip, there are usual hijinks (a misrepresented AirBnB, a broken AC unit, a back spasm, etc,.) but nothing that broached the contours of reality. Which is, I think, why the book loses me. I’m not reading a beach read for reality, necessarily — an elevated and more punctuated version. The question of whether they’d get together lost its ability to be compelling because nothing really set them back from it: their progress towards a relationship was plodding, but linear.

But I like Emily Henry, so I read on. Her writing is solid, scenes are summery, and there’s a proportion of banter and intensity that is predictable but pleasant. The vibe seems similar to Beach Read in a way that reassured me I like her style although the substance differed.

Alex didn’t stand out to me, but I did like him. Alex was nitpicky, khaki, and a bit neurotic, which is admittedly refreshing to read as a love interest. The book made it clear how much of their interest stemmed from genuinely knowing him and their history.

Emily Henry writes from her usual bag of tricks. They feel familiar, but get the job done: references, inside jokes, a formula of closeness, etc,. Dialogue, whether snappy or swoony, full-on committed to the bit but hey, that’s why you read a romance.

Often, a chapter would be a flashback to a previous trip that the two main characters took together. For a YA comparison, bits of this one reminded me of I See London, I See France by Sarah Mlynowski, in which each chapter is set in a different European city. The travel portions of this are written like a daydream, a telling summary with a set combination of characteristics that evoke the particular flavor of a place: food, events, people, smells, sights, etc,. Because it was summarized, it wasn’t quite sensory enough to check the box of my usual reading taste (“places so distinctive they feel like characters themselves”) but I did like it, even though the execution of “when Alex and I went to New Orleans, we —” was so heavy handed. And hey, since it’s a rom-com, each location gets a little razzle-dazzle: an almost kiss, or an intense dialogue about feelings, or a quirky inside joke that resurged again in later chapters.

The pacing was slow and it only took me two beach sessions to finish. Not much happened. There aren’t distinctive peaks and valleys that add texture and intensity; the main will-they-be-a-couple conflict remains constant and gradual throughout the whole book. It was convos, day trips, and flashbacks of cute travel moments together.

When conflict did arise — the ultimate pain points of their characters clashing — it was so abrupt and quick that it felt overly convenient. I felt like the “baggage” that each character brought to the moment wasn’t fully fleshed out. I checked and each big explosive moment only lasted a page or two, and there wasn’t much shrapnel.

All in all, I liked it. I just wish more happened in it. This isn’t inherently a negative review, just a nitpicky one. It feels pretty weak. Had it been Henry’s debut, I probably wouldn’t be as gracious about its flaws but I’ll let the hazy warm afterglow of Beach Read carry it to acceptable. (I’m not sure authors’ books exist in a vacuum for me.) It wasn’t so much the journey we expect from a narrative than a peek into a sweet, awkward love story we’re pretty sure we already know the ending to.

If you’re between this and another, go for the other.
If it’s on your shelf already, read it when you have a spare afternoon.
If you don’t own it, borrow from a friend or the library for a pleasant few hours if you’re bored.

But I’m not sure it stands strong enough on its own for much more.


2023 Update: It’s been several years since I wrote this review, and it’s actually much kinder than my long-term thoughts about the book. Since I happen to adore Emily Henry’s other work, this one to me feels like an outlier—something that’s not strong enough as a plot, and doesn’t show her best characteristics. It actually, genuinely annoys me that this book is so popular since I often describe it as having “zero plot.” Go read Beach Read instead! Current ranking goes: Beach Read, Happy Place, Book Lovers….then far down the line, People We Meet on Vacation.

For fans of:

Well, Emily Henry; In a Not So Perfect World by Neely Tubati-Alexander; This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune; The Reunion by Kayla Olson; I See London, I See France by Sarah Mlynowski; friends to lovers; etc,.