Beach Read
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4.2 • 443 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION AND BOOK LOVERS!
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A romance novel about a romance novelist? It may sound gimmicky, but Emily Henry pulls off the premise with high style, delivering a bubbly and satisfying story that puts a fresh spin on the enemies-to-lovers and forced-proximity conventions. When January Andrews finds out that she’s spending the summer next door to her graduate-school creative-writing rival Augustus Everett, she decides to settle, once and for all, their debate about whether romance constitutes a legitimate literary art form. She proposes that the classmates switch genres, with January taking a stab at writing tragic literary fiction while Gus tries to write a hot love story. Despite her book’s sunny cover and fun premise, Henry tackles poignant themes like grief and infidelity as she explores the experiences that have shaped her protagonists’ feelings about art and love. Beach Read lives up to its title and then some—it’s a gobble-it-up read with unexpected depth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Henry (Hello Girls) hits all the right notes with this clever, compassionate contemporary romance. January Andrews, a 29-year-old romance author, has always believed in happily-ever-after. Then her father dies and she inherits his secret lake house in North Bear Shores, Mich., and discovers his long-standing extramarital affair. Broke and suffering from writer's block, January's moves into the "lakeside cottage brimming with charm and proof your father was an asshole and your life has been a lie." Her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the tortured darling of the literary fiction world. Their contentious front-porch chats lead them to construct a challenge: they'll each spend the summer writing a novel in the other's genre, giving one another tutorials in their respective approaches and going on research trips together. Whoever finishes and sells their book first, wins. January's struggle to reconcile her inherent optimism with the recent upheaval in her life is thoroughly convincing and handled with empathy. Her and Augustus's path from writing partners to friends to lovers is a constant delight and the inevitable third act communication issues are deeply rooted in the characters' psychology, making them believable and fresh. Readers are sure to fall hard for this meta, heartfelt take on the romance genre.
Customer Reviews
I’m on the fence
This was a good book- it had laughter, tears, messy love, a little tragedy and lots and lots of hope. For those feeling a little lost in life you might really understand and feel these characters. But I had a few things that put me on the fence of love and hate. I was not crazy for the writing style. This is the first book I’ve read from Emily Henry. There where way too many pop culture references that distracted from the story and her sentence structure took me a long time to get in the flow of. I felt it was a little choppy. Now these are more me problems… so overall I was 4/5 stars.
Loved this book!
Such a great ‘beach read’ as the title suggests. Funny, sweet and unputdownable!!