People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry – emotionally layered friends to lovers romance

People We Meet on Vacation is beautiful, tender, deeply emotionally layered friends to lovers romance with nuanced characters, a compelling dual-timeline format, and writing that’s both witty and profound.

Synopsis

Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?

Review

People We Meet on Vacation is a slow-burn, emotional, and heartfelt story of Poppy and Alex—a twelve-year friendship that quietly, beautifully, evolves into something deeper. Love doesn’t arrive with fireworks here; it simmers gently, tucked inside summers shared, glances missed, and words left unsaid.

People We Meet on Vacation begins five years ago, mid-vacation, with Poppy and Alex already well into their yearly summer tradition. It’s instantly clear how wildly different they are—she’s all chaos and color, he’s calm and measured. And yet, they fit. They lift each other up, challenge each other, see each other—not just as friends, but as something more.

Now, Poppy is living her dream—working at Rest & Relaxation, a travel magazine under the best boss imaginable. She’s achieved every career milestone she ever dreamed of. But fulfillment? Nowhere in sight. When she confides in her best friend Rachel, the advice is simple: go back to the last time you felt truly happy. That takes her two years back, to her last summer trip with Alex—before everything went sideways and they stopped speaking.

Desperate to crawl out of her emotional and professional slump and maybe—just maybe—save their friendship, Poppy reaches out. She proposes one more summer trip: Palm Springs, California, coinciding with Alex’s youngest brother’s wedding. It was interesting to see how this one trip is going to fix what’s broken, how they’re going to confront what tore them apart—and what’s always been pulling them together.

The writing is gorgeous. It’s no mystery why romance readers adore Emily Henry. This wasn’t just romance story—it’s reflective, layered, and emotionally intelligent story. Each chapter unspools something tender, painful, or funny. You want to sit with these characters, unpack them, and live inside their hearts and make them alive in your heart.

The dual timeline—‘This Summer’ and flashbacks to summers past—is brilliant. From ‘Twelve Summers Ago’ when they first met, to ‘Two Summers Ago’ when everything shattered, the structure lets us slowly, intimately fall in love with them. You watch them go from strangers to best friends to that maddening, near-miss kind of almost-love that’s so palpable it aches.

Watching their friendship blossom, fall apart, and tentatively rebuild was raw and real. I wanted to scream at them sometimes—so much longing, so much fear—but I rooted for them hard. Their emotional tug-of-war felt genuine, never manufactured. And when they finally started naming the feelings they’d buried so long, it was impossible not to cheer them on.

People We Meet on Vacation is about more than love. It’s about connection, purpose, and rediscovering who you are when you’ve lost sight of it. It’s about how “home” isn’t a place—it’s a person. A person who makes you feel like the brightest, truest version of yourself.

I usually don’t gravitate toward friends-to-lovers, but this? This raised the bar. Alex and Poppy are opposites in every way imaginable, and yet, they click. Their connection—born from a shared ride home from college—grows into something rich and rare. It’s not InstaLove. It’s earned.

Poppy is loud, spontaneous, and allergic to staying still. Her hatred for her hometown, Linfield, stems from the bullying and isolation she faced growing up. She ran, and kept running—from place to place, vacation to vacation, turning her blog into a dream career. But it takes her a painfully long time to realize that it wasn’t the places that made her feel alive—it was the people. It was Alex.

Alex is quiet, bookish, and routine-loving. He’s been the responsible one since childhood, a second parent to his younger brothers after their mother died. He knows what he wants in life—except when it comes to Poppy. His tendency to avoid hard conversations and make assumptions frustrated me. Especially at the climax, where he twisted Poppy’s intentions and pushed her away. But later, I understood him better. His fear of losing Poppy, like he lost his mother, made him run from happiness itself.

People We Meet on Vacation is filled with brilliant, hilarious, and tender moments. And that ending was just amazing. Their issues were deeper and I appreciated that they both sought therapy. That emotional work gave them the clarity—and courage—to finally choose happiness and each other.

Overall, People We Meet on Vacation is beautiful, tender, deeply emotionally layered friends to lovers romance with nuanced characters, a compelling dual-timeline format, and writing that’s both witty and profound.

What to expect in People We Meet on Vacation

A Decade-long Friendship
Slow Burn Romance
Dual Timelines
Funny, Emotional, Layered
Opposites Attract
Many Heartfelt Moments

Book Links

Goodreads | Amazon.in | Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

What do you think about this?
What is your favorite vacation\/summer read?

Just in case you missed,,,

• The Comeback Summer by Ali Brady – emotionally rich contemporary
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen – slow and simple coming-of-age classic
• The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King (Crowns of Nyaxia #2) by Carissa Broadbent – addictive and steamy romantasy

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