This book was enjoyable but really just okay for me. I am not as big a fan of Emily Henry as most other readers. I think the characters are often a bit thinly constructed, and the choices they make less believable or relatable than characters constructed by some of her peers, like Jennifer Weiner or Taylor Jenkins Reid. That our protagonist wouldn't at some point explore - ohh, family practice or pediatrics--- when realizing surgery and hospital life wasn't for her, made the story feel absurdist to me. I enjoyed the setting and the friendships.

I didn’t like this one as much as her sassier enemies to lovers outings at first but the message about growing up and leaving your 20s behind was very poignant in the end…. And felt so real!

This is one of Emily Henry’s most emotionally charged books. It’s truly a feat because she packs in hilarious dialogue, rich friendships and a lot of childhood baggage.

This was a tough book for me - the writing and the characters are absolutely top notch. But the main emotion permeating the pages is: bitter sweetness. It just saturates the mood and plot.

That isn’t my ideal reading experience and yet I couldn’t stop reading. Thank the Lord for HEAs.

That being said, this is a beautiful and stunning read. I can’t wait to see what Emily writes next.

Came for the romance, stayed for the heartwarming friendship. My soul feels fuzzy and I have Emily Henry to thank, as always.

Book Lovers remains my favorite of heres (controversial I know) but this is a fun story that I would recommend to any rom-com reader.

It took me a year pondering on how to write this review because 1.) Emily Henry is one of my favorite romance writers, and 2.) I was sad to say I ended up feeling meh about this book.

Don't get me wrong. Happy Place still had that spark. It still made me feel nostalgic, romantic, and warm in such ways that only Henry could do. But I felt that some of the arguments could've been avoided if only miscommunication wasn't present in the majority of the plot. I also felt somehow disappointed that I didn't connect with both of the main characters hence I found myself not really rooting for their happy ending. It's one of those cases wherein the beginning kept me hooked but past the middle I was starting to feel like the pages were simply dragging me up to the end.

Would I still recommend it though? Yes. Happy Place is still a book that you will want to read especially on holidays or staycations that make you want to just abandon your real life and have the best time.

This book was definitely not what I was expecting it to be but I loved it nonetheless. Wyn and Harriet’s love story showed the true embodiment of soulmates. I did get frustrated at times with them and there were some parts that just didn’t make sense for me but I chose to ignore it because I love them too much.

Now, the found family trope in this book put the biggest smile on my face. I just really loved their dynamics and how close they all were years after they graduated college.

I will never get over Wyn & Harriet and this heartbreaking yet beautiful story. Overall I absolutely adored this book and was so sad when I finished. Might be time for a re-read???

Is it my all time favorite Emily Henry book? No, Beach Read and Book Lovers will always remain superior to me but this is right after those two.

Actual Rating: 3.5 stars
Happy Place follows Harriet and Wyn who have been broken up for months, unbeknownst to their close friends. Their friend group is meeting in their "happy place," a cottage in Maine owned by their friend Sabrina's family. Harriet is not expecting Wyn to be there, but he is, and this brings them to the decision to act as if they haven't broken up, as to not ruin this important friends trip. This week long trip forces Harriet and Wyn to finally face their break up and figure out what each of them truly want.

This is a story about friendship, found family, and figuring out what truly makes you happy. Emily Henry's writing is always engaging and her characters are always loveable. This book bounces around to the past and the present, which allowed me to really understand Harriet, her friend group, and her relationship with Wyn. This is an enjoyable read that is perfect for the summer. It is a little long and dragged a little in places, but in the end I really enjoyed this story. This story deals with a break up, grief, and what it means to grow and find yourself in a completely new phase of life. I can always count on Emily Henry for a romance with complexity in terms of story telling and character dynamics!

This book was amazing, it had me in a chokehold the whole time. Emily Henry never misses. I’ve recommenced this book to so many people and have only heard amazing things

Another absolute winner by Emily Henry, an author who always manages to take the usual formulaic romance genre and its tropes and mine something more out of them. That's exactly what she does here, and she delivers with her usual candor and fun dialogue a satisfying read.

I thought it was okay. This is about a second chance romance between Harriet & Wyn, where they never told their friends that they broke up, but a week-long vacation forces them to interact and essentially fake-date.

Once everything started to unfold on why they broke up, I honestly thought they’d be better off as friends. The lack of communication on their problems was kinda insane lmao. Wyn & Harriet go through individual and personal problems, which take them the entire book to realize. I did think it was longer than necessary.

I did enjoy reading the friendships between everyone and the friend group. Towards the middle, it started to drag for me. Also didn’t really like how it ended.

Too much miscommunication, too much crying. Who breaks up after 8 years and an engagement without talking about why you're calling it quits? Didn't connect with any characters and wasn't sad it was over. It's hit or miss with Emily Henry novels and this definitely wasn't a hit.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

Emily Henry everyone, has done it yet again.

Harriet and Wyn were the perfect couple, or still are according to their friend group, since they still think they are together. Harriet and Wyn have been separated for five months now. But it's the annual trip to the cottage and they will do anything to keep the week as normal as possible since it's the last week there given the cottage is being sold. This is how they have wound up sharing a room like always and pretending they are still together all while fighting the feelings that they both still want each other.

I loved this. For the longest time I swore of romance books and felt like they just were not for me, but this year, it's been a whirlwind of love on the pages, and I have soaked every word up. Harriet was one of the most relatable characters that I have read in a long time. Wyn made me want to rip my hair out at points.

All in all, Emily Henry never fails to put out a great romance with plenty of plot and even more enjoyable characters.

Wouldn’t say this was my favorite Emily Henry book, but it was still amazing nonetheless!

Emily Henry has this way of writing incredibly real and raw characters that you can easily relate to and feel so many emotions for. I found so many pieces of myself within Harriet & Wyn, and I could not help but love them — flaws and all.

It was painful being able to relate to Harriet so much. Her thoughts and perspectives on life (as well as so many other things) really made me feel seen, and I adored her character. On the other hand, I struggled a bit with Wyn in the beginning, but, as the book went on, I could see where he was coming from. I loved seeing these two finally get their happy ending.

Something that I really loved about this book was the sheer atmosphere of it. It was set in a small, scenic town with all the summer vibes I could have ever wanted, alongside an undertone of coziness. The setting was perfect for the story. Plus, there was an added liveliness with all the fun side characters and wonderful friendships. Everything just complemented the book and its intended message so well.

All in all, Emily Henry never fails to make me feel all the emotions with her books, even with a assumingly light, summer romcom like this one. The second chance angst of Harriet & Wyn’s story and the general atmosphere that was created truly drew me in, and I could not put it down. I already can’t wait to see what Emily Henry writes next.

Thank you so much to Berkley & NetGalley for an ARC of this book!

Emily Henry’s Latest Contemporary Romance Will Transport You to Your Happy Place

We’re far enough into this ongoing pandemic that it’s fascinating to see potential micro-trends popping up in fiction (aside from the clear delineation between those authors that did and did not set their novels in our covid timeline). One that stands out this year is group getaways in contemporary romances: Laura Kay’s Wild Things sees a group of friends buying a house in the English countryside—the lockdown dream—while Emily Henry’s latest reunites college buddies at the eponymous Happy Place in coastal Maine. But the requisite twist is that one of the couples, surgical resident Harriet Kilpatrick and carpenter Wyn Connor, have secretly broken off their engagement months ago without clueing in the most important people in their lives. And with their beloved cottage getting sold off, making this the final summer, they don’t want to burden the others with their breakup. So they’ll have to fake-date (fake-engage?) for a week with no one the wiser… what one might consider the lockdown nightmare.

It’s such a delicious premise for the fourth book from Henry, recently profiled in Vulture as having cracked the modern romance novel formula with her willingness to explore the darker anxieties that weigh down our need for love and connection. What’s especially interesting here is watching Henry fine-tune her own particular recipe for romance, tweaking similar elements from past books and recombining them into innovative new narratives. As I noted in last year’s review of Book Lovers, all of her novels are set over the summer, yet each utilizes the sunshine and breaks and vacations differently. Happy Place has the most in common with People We Meet on Vacation: a story that spans a decade, a summer getaway as the antidote to real-world stresses and disappointments, a way to check in on the same people and see if they still mean the same things to each other as more and more responsibilities and distractions crowd into the relationships they established when they were younger and more carefree.

Because for all the time that Happy Place spends in the present, it spends an equal amount of time apart from it—in the past and in other happy places, starting with when Harry met her roommates-turned-soulmates Sabrina and Cleo in freshman year of college. As various members of the original trio depart for semesters abroad or internships, they invite in a revolving door of roommates who happen to become Sabrina and Harry’s eventual partners: suave Parth, and his flirty bud Wyn. Rounding out the group is Cleo’s girlfriend Kimmy, the kind of bubbly person who fits into the dynamic so well that it’s hard to believe she was never there from the start. And as graduation—and grad school, and med school, and dropping out of school—steers each of the six into new orbits, what keeps bringing them back together is their summers at Sabrina’s family’s mansion-sized cottage in (fictional but affectionately detailed) Knott’s Harbor, Maine.

The book also wisely visits the unhappy places, the houses that never became homes, and the dark spirals into which we descend so deep that we can’t fathom finding our way back up. Supposed relationship milestones, like meeting the parents, instead reveal how happiness can be bound up in self-sacrifice, with love and partnership and commitment becoming a zero-sum game. Henry provides a multifaceted examination of this dilemma, through the lenses of lovers and spouses and parents and best friends.

But even this final summer, the portions demarcated as Real Life, is split into parallel experiences: Harry and Wyn trying to pull one over on their closest friends, and in the process stoking their own sexual tension; contrasted with Harry’s relatable confusion at not understanding why Wyn broke her heart months ago and what he wants from her now.

Fake dating is one of the more high-concept romance premises to pull off, but Henry grounds it in Harry and Wyn’s history, as well as their trust that their friends will be so busy clinging to nostalgia in their final week at the cottage that they’ll mentally spackle over any perceived tension with rose-colored memories of when the two first got together. Because those flashbacks are so authentic to the early-20s experience of first serious relationships and the trickiness of simultaneously twining your life around someone else’s while still learning enough about yourself and what you want. Experiencing their week of sham normalcy has even greater depth when contrasted alongside the ten years that forged the relationship that they’re now playacting. And that makes it even more fun when Harry is grinding on Wyn’s lap at the local dive bar, or Wyn is hamming up their blissful affianced status in the cottage pool.

But this book isn’t just about the main couple, it’s about the people whose feelings they’re trying to protect after they’ve already failed at protecting one another from their vastly diverging life paths.

Often in romances, even the strongest friend group can’t help but feel like fodder for future pairings—like even if the foils and confidantes are fully fleshed-out, it’s often (very smart!) groundwork being laid for the next installment. Not so here, where both Sabrina and Parth, and Cleo and Kimmy, possess their own engaging dynamics with micro and macro tensions that do and don’t include Harry and Wyn. It brings to mind the commiserating faculty foursome in Christina Lauren’s My Favorite Half-Night Stand, whose rhythms and rituals are so lived-in that reading almost feels like eavesdropping… but you can’t stop yourself from listening in.

The cottage is almost its own character, as well, Henry so lovingly details it through Harry’s key memories. You can so clearly envision the wine cellar in which occurs a pivotal moment in their early relationship (and, one could argue, an even more crucial development in the present), or the room with the two twin beds upon which they first fall in love.

As in Book Lovers, Henry has again established a compellingly tense will-they-won’t-they that makes, honestly, a more convincing argument for Harry and Wyn not to stay together. Though their friends are clearly family, their blood families also undeniably influence their relationship in all of its phases; Henry delves unflinchingly into how even supposedly innocuous neglect from parents can shape an impressionable child’s sense of safety when it comes to future relationships. The ways in which Harry’s flawed self-preservation ripples into the relationships that actually matter to her will keep you following her from place to place hoping she’ll find her way through.

Only Emily Henry can write a book where the message is “the happy place is the friends we made along the way” and make it not hopelessly cheesy. It’s in fact a heavy read, but the kind where you’ll look back with a teary-eyed smile.

This was such a great story! Emily Henry has a way of creating stories filled with likable characters and believable plots. I know that her novels are often considered "beach reads" but they are more than just a quick read.

Harriet is lying through her teeth, pretending that she and her perfect fiance Wyn have not broken up. Their friends have invited them all for one last vacation at their "happy place" so that they can relive their youth and celebrate the past. This really made me want to eat seafood and drink a ton of wine.....wishing for a college experience I just did not have. Great story. Henry is an entertaining writer and her characters are quirky.

The story of former lovers who are now barely friends who must pretend to still be in love and engaged to be married! They are stuck with their best friends in a vacation home by the sea in Maine, and must share a room with a king sized bed, not twin beds.
The suspense in the novel hangs on this trope - former lovers pretending to still be in love.
Most of the book details the friends enjoying shopping, cooking, eating and drinking on their beach vacation, being together as an annual ritual soon to be broken when the vacation home is sold. The pretence of Harriet and Wyn leads to a predictable ending, but the reader does spend their reading time on vacation with the group and wishing for a happy ending.

A light beach read, that has one main romantic suspense theme. I wished for a more diverse plot with more angles to the story.

It was a light read with a happy ending. I enjoy all of Emily Henry's books. They are light but not with guts and good characters.

This is now my favorite Emily Henry book! I cried and laughed many times and could not put it down! Read it from start to finish. The chemistry and development of the characters were top notch and I wish I had more time with the main characters. honestly, I wish I had some bonus content from the side characters' viewpoints, they all seemed so interesting!