I enjoyed Beach Read, and Emily Henry is one of the big publishing sensations of the last five years. I’d put off You and Me on Vacation (known outside Australia and the US as “People We Meet on Vacation“) because I found that I’d bought it in an Audible sale years ago, and the time allocated to an audiobook lives in a different compartment to that of a print or Kindle book, mentally.
Unfortunately, it seems that You and Me on Vacation could have been put off forever, because I did not enjoy it at all. The epigraph reads “I wrote the last one mostly for me. This one’s for you.” As a result, Henry has written a book she doesn’t want and I don’t either.
For twelve years, Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen have been the best of friends. Every year, they would go somewhere for a summer vacation, until two years ago, in Croatia, something happened that saw them cut off almost all contact. Now at a loose end writing for her travel magazine, Poppy wants to rediscover her joie de vivre, and reconnects with Alex to invite him away for a week in Palm Springs, culminating in his brother’s wedding. The only problem is she’s pretending that it’s a work assignment, and she’s bankrolling the whole thing herself.
Told in the present day, but interspersed with historical accounts of Poppy and Alex’s trips (related as if they were just happening, rather than Poppy being retrospective), You and Me on Vacation tracks their relationship from its inauspicious beginnings to its catastrophic collapse, into its inevitable future.
Love does not bloom between the pages (or the ears) of You and Me on Vacation: it is always there. There is no slow build up to Poppy developing feelings for Alex, despite what her narration tells you. This isn’t love at first sight, but it’s so close to it that you know you’re reading about twelve wasted years. It does not take her long at all to want to spend her life with him even if she’ll never admit it until the reader’s patience has worn gossamer thin.
Henry here subscribes to the romance novel theory that if there’s any problems in a relationship, it’s the fault of one person alone, and the other is a perfect angel. Poppy blames herself for everything that goes wrong, despite the fact that Alex Nilsen is a stuck up prig. He is presumptuous, he always assumes the worst and, despite having Poppy as a confidante, he never tells her the actual important things. This failure to communicate on both of their parts is a genre hallmark, but it is always treated as if it is Poppy failing to pick up on cues. No. Alex is rude. Alex has no social skills. Poppy claims that there’s a “Naked Alex” that only she sees and understands. And he’s a jerk.
Don’t get it wrong: Poppy sucks too. Big time. You and Me on Vacation is performed by legendary audiobook reader Julia Whelan, who has done many, many books, but one in particular for the purposes of this review: Gone Girl. Poppy comes across like the Cool Girl that Amy talks about in that novel, and she sounds exactly like the most disingenuous person you’re ever likely to come across. This is a charmless woman who acts ridiculously entitled without realising that her playful teasing is actually more akin to bullying. She’s not nice to be around.
There’s also a secret thread that makes you hope that Emily Henry doesn’t identify too much with her protagonist: Alex is fastidious about cleanliness, but Poppy doesn’t “enjoy showering … I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.” It’s an incredibly weird statement to put three quarters into your romance novel, and there’s no suggestion that Poppy, with her active lifestyle, is bathing on her off-shower days. You have to sit with this knowledge for the end-run of the book, and suddenly you don’t trust Poppy on anything any more. There is a theory that is not allowed to be spoken aloud – and if it had any ballast, it would have made for a far more interesting book. Possibly written by Helen Hoang.
In her afterword, Henry talks about When Harry Met Sally, and its influence on this book. Maybe if You and Me on Vacation had a deli scene, it would be good. Henry says “[Nora] Ephron … left this indelible mark on me, planted a seed of ardent appreciation for characters who grate and irritate and infuriate, until the moment they suddenly don’t.” Alex and Poppy never don’t grate.
Sometimes a book’s title is tweaked internationally for very basic reasons and it either makes logical sense or it’s a huge impact to the interpretation of a book. People We Meet On Vacation is a title that only makes sense when Phoebe makes her giant speech towards the end, the traditional grand gesture, and there is absolutely nothing in the book to back up her grand thesis that boils down to three people from two separate vacations. It’s a terrible mission statement that doesn’t hold up in the text at all.
You and Me on Vacation is a far cry from Beach Read, which featured characters who were more grounded, and a late-stage drama that kind of made sense — and at the very least was squarely on the shoulders of the love interest, rather than the narrator.
When you put it all together, maybe You and Me on Vacation does make sense: Alex and Poppy are perfect for each other because that way they’re not ruining the lives of anyone else. Despite all of its tropes, You and Me on Vacation is not a boilerplate romance novel, because it fails at every single element that constitutes a satisfactory one. Not enough yet to give up on Emily Henry, but if this was the first I’d read, I wouldn’t read any more.
