Beach Read
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4.3 • 4.8K Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
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
A romcom that changed the game.
Beach Read comes across as a fun summer read, but in reality it’s a raw story about grief, heartbreak, and falling back in love with yourself as much as it is a romance. Emily Henry has such a talent for weaving together humor and depth that each took my breath away. I had tears from laughter and sadness at each page and each took me off guard and kept me on my toes. January’s life taking a 180 and her whole world view being challenged set the tone for the story and the way it was tied up in the end broke my heart and put it back together all in one sitting. And then there was Gus. I fell so hard for him at every detail revealed just as January did. His character seemed at first to be a dark, mysterious type but his soft side came through in such a thoughtful way. Both characters give to each other what the other was missing and in turn they learn to begin to heal themselves in the process. Overall, Beach Read both tugs at the heartstrings and shares near-revolutionary and profound truths about grief and love.
Beach read
It was so cute and perfect to read in summer
Forced!
The story seemed forced and the writing really immature. I love fluff but this was beyond!