Alice and Hayden have both camped out in a small, Southern beach town to vie for the opportunity to write Margaret Ives’ – the famed heiress who graced every tabloid – biography. Margaret is in her 80s and a full hermit. This would be career-making for any writer. Margaret isn’t going to make it easy. She’s sharing only the tiniest snippets of her unbelievable and mysterious life and asking them to fill in the blanks. Only one of them can tell her story and fighting for the chance may keep them from exploring the romantic tension that’s very quickly building between them.
I’m not typically a romance girly, but I change my tune when Emily Henry is behind the typewriter. The internet (and my book buds) is divided on this one, but I generally liked it and am placing it solidly in the middle of my ranking. I disagree with the people who don’t like it on the basis of it not being a true romance like Emily Henry’s other books…I thought it was VERY much a romance. Not romance subplot – full on romance that happened to have a parallel non-romance storyline. Like all EmHen (and romance in general), it all depends on which tropes you like. I like rivals to lovers so I was into it, but I think she could have amped up the rivalry for a few more pages. I actually liked Hayden, so it made it easier to root for them as a pairing. I also liked the Ives plot, but I felt like she pulled a little tooo much inspo from Evelyn Hugo. My biggest issue with this plot line wasn’t with the concept itself but with how it impacted the pacing of the book. Because we were splitting our time between the two plots, the romance moved a bit too fast. They’re full-on in love after 4 weeks and – STOP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS – go from living in bicoastal major cities to living in separate GA towns 3.5 hours apart to being pregnant to having a 4 month old in the span of a single paragraph on the last page. I had to reread it multiple times to make sure Alice wasn’t pregnant but still living with her mom in a small town while Hayden was in Atlanta. Also, I know I said I liked Hayden, but I still have qualms: refusing to sleep with Alice but still starting to hook up with her multiple times really bothered me. I don’t like the martyr act and, since they’re still hooking up, he’s not actually doing as he purports and protecting her emotions. The romantic tension in some of EmHen’s books is built around severe lack of communication (which is what I disliked about Happy Place and REALLY disliked in People We Meet On Vacation) so I liked that Alice and Hayden were pretty upfront with each other and themselves when it came to their feelings. Maturity! Yay! Also, I love the idea of remaking a world around someone you love and applaud Henry for writing a light book that somehow still manages to tackle the idea of generational trauma’s impact on love.
4 out of 5 stars.
Pair with: vodka blueberry lemonade in a fishbowl with two crazy straws and a nerds rim
Peaches to Apples 