‘Beach Read’

Recommend? Yes!

Read if you like: Sally Thorne, Beth O’Leary, Emma Straub

I am, admittedly, very late to the Beach Read party. It’s been recommended to me since it came out and just didn’t read it. I thought, quite reasonably, I’d say, that this had one of the sunny beach settings I’m not fond of and I don’t read blurbs so it took a looooonng time to figure out that this took place in Michigan on a forested lake beach which is so much better.

Okay. Very sweet. Not-quite-enemies to lovers is always fun, especially when you like the characters, which I did. I hate when only one of the characters in a romance is fleshed out and I’m just expected to care that they end up with a *specific* person over another. January and Gus were nice and I felt like, ‘yes, these two should be together’ which always makes it more satisfying when they ultimately are.

One of my favorite things that really set this book apart for me was its third act. Often I’m annoyed at the twists and stupid misunderstandings that occur for those “all hope is lost” moments of the story, but in this, it felt like Emily Henry had done the background work to make everything fit together plausibly.

In the interest of not giving too much away, I’ll stop here, but I really did like this one.

Berkeley Books