“Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.”

Beach Read, by Emily Henry

Summary

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no-one will fall in love. Really.

My Thoughts

My contemporary romance reads tend to be few and in between, and when I do dabble in the genre, it is when I am not looking for something serious, but just something to shut my mind off and enjoy—Ana Huang, or Hannah Grace, or authors like that. They have wonderful books, but not super thought-provoking. Beach Read was the first more serious contemporary romance novel I’ve read, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I genuinely enjoyed it. As a writer myself, I loved reading about two writers stuck in the process and helping each other out. More than that, this book is about overcoming trauma. Both January and Augustus are hurt, not just by their childhoods but by more recent events. The book is told from January’s perspective, so we get to unpack her history first, but through her, we learn more about Augustus. They are both struggling, and make bad decisions occasionally. This isn’t always fun to read; January is grieving her father and very negative, and she drinks a lot. They misinterpret (as in any romance novel) but it makes sense because Henry has a very strong understanding of what motivates her characters, and the misunderstandings do not come out of nowhere, but are instead fueled by the characters own miscommunications and insecurities. I understand why Augustus does not share certain things once I learn more, or why January is prone to certain insecurities. It’s a slow novel, all things considered. A lot of events happen, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them hard plot so much as moments and scenes for growth. It’s a very internal, character driven novel, with a lot of musings and hard work. When the characters get together at the end it feels earned, not just because they have overcome a lot mentally, but because they have each empowered one another to confront their pasts in a way. I loved that—not just that this was a romance novel, but that as much as it was a romance novel, it was a novel about two broken people healing. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Though I will say, it’s a bit cheesy that our characters are named January and Augustus, even if he thankfully goes by Gus.

Review: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

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