Review: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Summary

Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

Thoughts

Why was I avoiding reading this book for so long? I think it was partially because of how hyped this book was, which is usually a sure way to keep me away from it. Even though I had already read her other two books and enjoyed them. Even though I had been interested in this one. I avoided it still.

Well I finally read it for a challenge read, my first of 2023! And I was admittedly a bit grumbly to myself about making a book I was reluctant about to be the coveted first read and review of the year. But hey, it was actually quite good. Maybe next time I won’t hold back on her book?

It didn’t blow me away, but I enjoyed it. It read fast, too, so if there were any things I didn’t love
(there were) it was pretty easy to move past them to something better in short time.

The two key things I didn’t love were the reason for Nora to fight being interested in or attracted to Charlie — there honestly didn’t seem to BE much of a reason?? — and the apparent conflict between Nora and her sister. I didn’t understand why any of the things that were an issue for them were issues. Maybe that’s a personal difference in my life that made it hard to empathize or relate, but the things they were upset about just made no sense to me.

This is also obviously a book about book people, and with that comes some obligatory playing with tropes and cliches. For the most part I enjoyed the way they were handled in this story, but it was still a lot of them, and it did start to feel less original the more I read since it was like every romance trope in one. Which, yes, is the point, but I’m just glad it wrapped up when it did.

So what I enjoyed? Well overall, the character setup for Nora was wonderful and charming and made it quite easy to root for her. I often have a hard time understanding characters who are like “Being a corporate lawyer working 90 hour weeks is all I ever dreamed of!” but Nora is still relatively grounded despite her passion for her work.

Though I said the tropes got to be a bit much toward the end, for the first large portion they were genuinely amusing to see them pop up in tweaked iterations of their usual. It wasn’t aggressively quirky though, so thank goodness for that.

Basically, if you liked her other books you’ll probably like this one, but I do think it’s fairly different in overall style than her others. It’s more similar to Beach Read than People We Meet on Vacation so take that as you will.