Beach Read by
Emily Henry
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
Woah. Just like wow.
This is how you want to write anything—with passion, with the belief that your words deserve to be heard, believing that your characters and their emotions are valid. I just want to say I am very glad Emily Henry woke up one day and there was confidence in her and that nothing stopped her from writing Beach Read.
I loved this book throughly. From start to finish, and every second in between. It caused me sorrow, it gave me laughter, and it inspired me.
Beach Read is written in the point of view of January Andrews, a publish author who by her own words has always looked at life with rose-colored glasses, but recently big cracks have devastated the perfect life she thought she had. Now January has been feeling like a new person, cynical and sad, trying to comprehend if she’ll ever feel like herself again or if this is who she is now.
Enter a summer spend in the little beach town her dad grew up in. She has plenty of reasons to despise being here but slowly but surely, she starts to discover a lot about the world, and herself, that she missed before.
There’s a book club in there, run by ladies who love spy novels and bad cocktails. There’s a best friend who hits all the marks for a true best friend. There’s a family tragedy, painful and raw. And there’s an old school rival and fellow writer next door who sees life the opposite way she does and through a spontaneous bet between them the summer becomes a learning experience.
I have so much love and respect for book’s who develop characters and relationships as delicately and precise as this one does. Nothing about January’s relationship with both her parents, with her best friend, with her neighbor Gus, or the ladies at the bookclub felt untrue to her character. Her personality shone through all her interactions with everyone the same way. I believed who she was, therefore I believed all her actions and the course of her thoughts.
All the characters were perfectly drafted too, no one felt like a side character to me. Instead they all added depth and their own uniqueness to the story. I could reach out and touch them through the pages as if they were real.
Some of my favorite moments, and there were a lot of them, where the times January spend loving her dad. It made me understand her heartbreak so much better, because my own heart felt positively broken too. The author nailed the feeling of unending love between a father and his daughter.
And of course I can’t end this review without nodding to the perfectly imperfect Gus Everett, who grew as much or maybe even more than January. Who every time that he showed a real piece of his heart made me want to jump into the pages and kiss him. The times he opened up to reveal who he was felt like little prizes I have earned. The way he declared his feelings so bravely even though he was scared—he was a writer, alright, no one has a gift with words quite like him.
It’s an all around gorgeous book. Perfect in all the ways that matter. I wish for you all to realize this for yourselves. I’m glad I did.
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IT COMES OUT TODAY! .
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