A story about a girl who tries to confess her feelings to her best friend over a number of years of summer vacations and misunderstandings.
Poppy and Alex are best friends right from their encounter on the first day of the college freshman year. But, their interests and preferences are like the two sides of a coin. Poppy is a wanderlust; she works for a travel magazine company and is always looking for a way to travel to different places. Alex wears khakis and prefers to sit in a room with a book in his hand.
Poppy wants to live in a busy city like New York, whereas Alex wants to settle in a more peaceful place like his hometown Linfield, Ohio.
Like every rom-com story, opposite characters attract each other, here Alex and Poppy know there is something going on between them more than just friendship. Yet, they don’t want to talk it out loud and lead their own personal lives. The best thing in this story are the vacations that Alex and Poppy go on together during summer. Since, both live in different places, they developed a tradition to always spend their summer vacations together somewhere new and exciting.
It was all going well, until something worse happened between them during the summer trip, two years back. They stopped talking after that. Randomly, one day Poppy messages Alex and the old connection springs back to life and they plan on a summer vacation to Palm Springs, California coupling with Alex brother’s wedding. They go on this vacation and rediscover their interests for each other.
You can’t make others happy, if they don’t want to be
Henry beautifully paces the story with alternating chapters of previous summer vacations and the present one. The one thing that bothered me about this book was that, though the story is told from the perspective of Poppy, we get to know very little about Alex’s feelings. Not even a whole chapter about how Alex feels about Poppy.
The best takeaway I got from this book is that “you can’t make others happy, if they don’t want to be”. It’s always nice to know that you learned something from a book when you think back later and I would definitely remember this book for giving me a sweet, fluffy read as well as something that will help in my personal life.
If you love friends-lovers, if you miss travelling during this pandemic time, if you love the perfect balance of humour and angst in a book, People We Meet on Vacation is definitely for you. I highly recommend you to take this book as your next read. This is my first Emily Henry book and now I’m tempted to read all her books without fail.
P.S.: I found an awesome summery vibe Spotify playlist by Mina Reads that you can play in the background while reading this book.