Beach Read by Emily Henry

Beach Read | Emily Henry 

May 19th 2020 | Berkley   

Source: Library 

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.

I have so much to say about this book and a lot of it isn’t positive. So let’s just get this over with.

The good
—I really enjoyed the writing. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Emily Henry so maybe I’ll check out other things she’s written. Aside from the issues I did have, this was an extremely quick read.

—Even though I didn’t come to this book for this, I didn’t mind the really touch interviews Gus and January conducted. It’s fascinating to see the behind the scenes of interviews for thrillers and the like.

The bad
—this isn’t the fun, summery romance I was expecting based on the praise, the cover, or the premise. There is a lot to do with grief and I’m so glad I was warned about it. This might not bother some people but as someone who recently lost a family member this was not easy for me. There is no mention of the grief in the premise and I think that is a disservice. I went into this book expecting a romance novel where I could disappear from my reality. Instead, I had to grapple with January’s grief which reminded me of my own.

—When you tell me that I’m about to read a romance, I expect certain things. For one, the story to be about the two people falling in love. There’s some conflict (maybe some drama) and probably some angst. I want to spend as much time reading about these two people pining away for each other. There’s an HEA.

When you tell me I’m going to read women’s fiction, I think of a story that might have a romance but doesn’t focus on that. This story will focus on the growth of the MC. She’ll go through a transformation by the end of the story. She’ll might end up in a HEA but that won’t be the main focus. (It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly the distinctions are but this is what I think of).

I pointed this distinction out because there were a lot of conflicting things said in the book about what January writes. For someone who claims to be a romance writer, there was a lot of disdain and the need for a distinction between writing women’s fiction and romance. At one point January points out that her stories are upbeat romances or aren’t even shelved in romance sections but in women’s fiction. But January is constant need to distinguish between the two for Gus just left a bad taste in my mouth.

In many ways, I felt as if January was implying pirate, Fabio like romances weren’t all that special and she was writing real books, thank you very much. I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well but there it is.

—Shadi serves no other purpose in this story other than being a WOC in this otherwise white cast of characters. I also thought she was the most stereotypical Black woman there could be. She was the best friend that January would reach out to that serves to uplift her best white friend. Her characterization was so bad I can’t tell you anything about her other than she was dating a lot of people?Which isn’t bad at all but if that’s all there is to the character than I’m not sure if it’s a good thing. For those of you who read this book am I missing something?

—As we can tell from the premise, Gus is going to try to write a romance novel and January is going to try to write a literary fiction novel. While I won’t spoil certain things about this, I do you wanna point out that I felt like there was more weight put on to literary fiction versus romance. By the end of the novel and I felt like Gus haven’t really learned much from his experience. I wanted there to be more of a reason as to why he agreed to write romance. Obviously, this is a very personal opinion. When it came to January writing literary fiction, I think that we were given so much more background into the research that goes into literary fiction novels. The balance didn’t really work for me. Personally, I got the implication that romance novels don’t take as much research to write and that literary fiction is full of nothing but research. This might be an extremely nitpicky thing to talk about but it was something that didn’t sit well with me.

At the end of the day I understand that this book was not for me. There is clearly such a large group of people who really enjoy it and I’m glad y’all have thus book.