Beach Read by Emily Henry | Book Review

Hello, book lovers! 💕

The following is 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:

When I first picked this book up, I didn’t know anything about it other than what I read from the synopsis. And even then, I was kind of apprehensive about picking it up. It was one of the Book of the Month club books for the month of April, and it was the only one out of the five choices that seemed remotely interesting to me, probably because it’s about writers and romance and all that fun stuff.

I’m still finding my way into adult fiction since I primarily usually read YA fiction. But this one didn’t disappoint in any way. It was easy to read and really interesting to follow the two writers in their journeys in conquering writer’s block. But that’s not completely what the story was about. There was a lot of emotion that I wasn’t necessarily expecting but ended up liking for the fact that I was able to get a deeper understanding of the characters, especially January.

I think that’s what I enjoyed the most about this book: how many different layers the characters had that, as a reader, I was trying to figure out. It made them feel real, and that’s when I know it’s a good story.

The reason I gave it four stars rather than a full five is because I kind of felt like the pacing, while it worked in some aspects of the story, was kind of slow. Though I’m not sure if that’s just me because I know that there were people who were flying through this book in a couple of days. Maybe it was just me since I have been preoccupied with other things and haven’t really had the attention span to sit down and read a physical book.

But overall, I really enjoyed it. It actually inspired me to want to write again since I’ve been working on a novel for what seems like forever.

So there you have it. Those are my thoughts on Beach Read by Emily Henry. Have you read this book? If so, what are your thoughts on it? I would love to discuss them in the comments below!

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