Another Romance - Don't Worry, I'm Gearing Up For Lots of Horror Soon!

TITLE: Beach Read
AUTHOR: Emily Henry
PUBLISHER: Berkley
PUBLISHING DATE: May 19, 2020

FROM GOODREADS: 

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: Man did I love this book!  The only thing which would have made it more perfect was if there had been a dog.  By the way, Ms. Henry, why wasn't there a dog?

So I easily devoured Beach Read in two days, or to be more precise, probably closer to a 24-hour period in a two day span.  But I need to say, this was no "cute" rom com.  Henry tackles some pretty heavy topics including infidelity, trust and self esteem.  There are even some hints of child neglect which are subtly interspersed and used to develop Gus's character to the point that even though he was rather frustrating most of the time, I still wanted to give him a big hug.

January (and can I stress how much I love that name) is having trouble writing her next romance novel and fresh from a break-up and falling on financial struggles, she decides to spend the summer in a beach house her father left her when he died.  A home she didn't know existed and which he shared with his lover.  She arrives and soon discovers her neighbor is another famous author who just happened to be one of her biggest rivals in college.  Enter the hate to love trope which I enjoy tremendously.

I loved the banter and disdain between the two main characters.  I also loved seeing their relationship grow to that of a friendship before they even considered taking it any further.  January has a lot of emotional baggage to unpack and Gus clearly has kept himself closed off for years.  In fact, some of the residents of the small beach town are actually related to Gus and it takes forever for the pieces to fall into place.

Henry has written a spot-on book which just happens to feature romance.  I honestly don't feel it should be looked at as romance driven because there are so many other themes which to me were much more important.  Very rarely do I give a book of this genre a 5/5 rating, unless of course there is a cute dog, so you know my rating speaks volumes.  If you have ever even remotely considered picking this book up, do it!  I doubt you'll be sorry.

RATING: 5 PAWS