Harriet and her college roommates have always gone to her "happy place," a home owned by Sabrina's family in Maine, for vacation no matter how hectic their lives have gotten. This will be the final one, however, as the house will go up for sale. So Sabrina, Parth, Cleo, Kimmy, Wyn, and Harriet all meet up for one last hurrah that Sabrina has planned for them down to the minute. The only problem? Harriet and Wyn haven't told their friends they broke up.

This was an okay second-chance romance that somehow I wanted to be more. Harriet is our narrator, and it goes back and forth between the story now and what happened in past years - first her and Wyn getting together secretly, and eventually why they broke up. Neither of them, for different reasons, is good at communication and I found myself impatient with them as often as I was charmed. The friendship aspect of the story was much more interesting to me than the romance. ( )

I really liked this book a lot, but for some reason it took me a long time to read it. I would put it down and not get back to it for a few days. I'm not usually like that with books I am enjoying. The first part moved a little slow and I really wanted to know why Wyn and Harriet were apart, and it took a long time to get to the bottom of that. Maybe the back and forth in time wasn't as smooth as it should have been, I'm not sure. I liked both Harriet and Wyn. They weren't perfect. They both had issues they needed to work through. I wanted them to hash it out sooner so we could have seen them and their friends truly in their happy place for longer. ( )

Well, this was just not my cup of tea. I felt the story was too far fetched and I really didn't enjoy either of the main characters. ( )

Even though the ending was predictable, I was gushing tears from Emily Henry's novel ( )

{stand alone; romance, friendship, growing up}(2023)

My friends: willowy, honey-haired Sabrina and wisp of a waif Cleo, with her tiny silver septum piercing and dip-dyed box braids. My two favourite people on the planet since our freshman year at Mattingly College
...
I couldn't have imagined being any happier, loving anywhere else as much.
Not until Sabrina brought us here, to her family's summer home on the coast of Maine. Not until I met Wyn.

Sabrina, Cleo and Harriet were roommates in their freshman year at college and have been best friends ever since, through graduation, professional degrees and jobs. They spend every summer together, now also with their respective partners, at Sabrina's family's summer home; but this year will be the last time they will all be together there since Sabrina's father's current wife wants him to sell it. Harriet hasn't told her friends yet that she and her fiancé, Wyn, broke up. Months ago. But when she lands at the cottage, he's there too, though he wasn't supposed to be. And Sabrina wants this to be the last, perfect fling so she can't tell them yet though she had planned to do it when she got to Maine. So Harry and Wyn are going to have to pretend for a week.

A story about friendships maturing as well as a relationship in flux. The story is told partly in flashbacks* so we see when it went wrong. It is not due the usual silly misunderstandings but to deeper issues, thankfully, so I found it more readable than most books in the genre. The bedroom scenes are not too graphic nor gratuitous, which also earned points from me because I felt that the book was stronger for focusing on the plot. I liked seeing the relationship (and the friendships) not in its first throes but at a more mature point, with them talking to each other and trying to fix it.

The ending, though good, sort of peters out, I felt. I'm not entirely convinced Harry made the best choice with such a drastic career change; she could have changed fields/ locations instead, perhaps but she got her happy ending.

(* One gripe: I wish authors would stop using the present tense for things that happened in the past, especially if they're also going to use flashbacks; at least those should be in the past tense so we readers know when we are)

I liked this story because of the way that everyone genuinely cared for everyone else in the group and once they realised that their friends had evolved, the relationships could evolve too. Give it a go.

(August 2023)
3.5-4 stars ( )