Blurb (on back of book):
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.
MY OPINION: ***
After loving Emily Henry's Beach Read as much as I did, I had high expectations for this one, especially since people are talking about it all over social media as the "perfect summer read." Unfortunately, I ended up not enjoying this book as much as I hoped and I was tempted to abandon it many times; however, I usually never quit books so I wasn't about to start now. By the end, I did start to enjoy it a bit more, which resulted in my three-star mediocre rating, but I was leaning towards two stars most of the time.
The book moved incredibly slowly and I hated the pacing of it. I wish things could have moved faster; it would have also resulted in a much shorter book, which I would have appreciated. A lot of things felt drawn-out and unnecessary and I hated how much extraneous details about Alex and Poppy ended up in the book. I also hated how the book was told between the present and various flashbacks to previous summers because it felt disjointed and confusing.
Poppy is a free spirit; she loves to travel, she's not huge on commitment, and she hates being alone. To be quite honest, her character didn't speak to me as I would have expected a main character to speak to me, especially since we were reading from her perspective the entire time. I didn't like her personality and I hated how she seemed to look down on everyone around her, as if she were better than them. I did like her overall character development but it felt slow-going and boring. We also get to see way too much of her boring relationships with various men throughout the summers that this book recounts and I felt like most of the "love" affairs that she had with those men were pointless to include in this book. As someone who expected the friends-to-lover story with Alex, I was sorely disappointed at the amount of time we spend reading about her other boring, mundane men (who she doesn't actually have long, committed relationships with for the most part).
I did like Alex and although one of his biggest insecurities is being seen as "boring" I found him to be plenty more interesting than Poppy. He is a very orderly, organized man who likes things to be simple and mundane. He likes the opposite of almost everything Poppy likes, including living in the "boring" town of Ohio and working as a teacher alongside his on-and-off girlfriend, Sarah. However, I loved all of Alex's quirks and random personality traits that made him an individual, rather than a generic 2D character built out of the "I'm-so-weird-and-unique" mold.
The relationship between Poppy and Alex took FAR too long to happen. I'm usually a huge fan of slowburns and love the tension and buildup to the first kiss, the first everything, but this one was just too long. I didn't feel any chemistry between them and I wasn't even rooting for them half the time, to be quite honest. I wish they had gotten together sooner or at least admitted their feelings to each other sooner because it would have made the book that much more interesting. I also did not feel the TENSION or the ANGST and instead I just felt like they hated each other more and more, particularly Alex to Poppy as everything seems to be going wrong on their trip.
Another thing I hated was that there were several mentions of a huge fight Poppy and Alex had on one of their past trips that caused them to stop speaking to each other for a couple of years, hence the reason why Poppy dragged Alex on the current trip in the first place; however, we never get to know what actually happened until it was far too late for the "surprise" to be worth anything to me as a reader. In the beginning, I was itching to know what happened; by the end, I could have cared less.
Overall, I was sorely disappointed with this one. I had expected so much and it fell far below my expectations. Nonetheless, I would recommend this book to readers looking for a literary fiction/summer romance.
Main Character: Poppy
Sidekick(s): Alex
Villain(s): Fight, misunderstanding, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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