I was invested in Harriet and Wyn right of the bat. Their banter was perfection. I also enjoyed the friendship between the 6 friends and seeing how that friendship changes and grows along with the changes and growth in their own lives. A really fun read!

I mean, it's Emily Henry, so what can be said? I love everything she writes, but HAPPY PLACE is my new favorite. At its core, it's a romance, but I also loved the realistic and empathetic pen Henry used to draw the friendships. They only get more complex as we get older and Henry expertly portrayed that. Harriet and Wyn were just heart-wrenching—the longing they both felt for each other was visceral, and I was rooting for them to figure themselves—and each other—out from page one. As always, a masterpiece.

What we’ve all come to expect from Emily Henry - well-drawn, relatable characters, sizzling banter, and all the feels. Just delightful in every way

First, a huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Emily Henry does it again with Happy Place! Harriet and Wyn seem to be the perfect couple, the one their friends are certain were simply made to be together. But unbeknownst to said friends, the so called "perfect couple" broke up over five months ago. With their annual friend group trip to Maine coming up, Wyn and Harriet agree to pretend to still be together to avoid ruining the trip for their friends with any ensuing awkwardness. Henry switches scenes from the past to the present so seamlessly, readers will be swept into Harriet and Wyn's romance. Another stand out hit from Henry that will tug n readers' heartstrings in all the best ways.

Thank you to Berkley and NetGalley for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

As usual, Emily Henry climbed inside my brain and messed around and then climbed back out and left me a shell. This book more than her others really struck me because of the ensemble case and how well-written every character was. I cared about Harriet and Wyn, of course I did, but I also cared about Cleo and Sabrina and their lives. I loved the atmosphere and it made me want to be super rich and buy a lake house right away.

Anyway, this was perfect. 5 stars.

Every time I read an Emily Henry book I think, “this is my new favorite” and Happy Place was no exception. Second chance romance with the banter of enemies to lovers and the only one bed trope are just a few of the amazing elements of this story. The real superstar for me was the emotional vulnerability felt by the main characters. They felt so real and I needed to root for their happiness (even if that meant they wouldn’t be together in the end). Please note, that’s not a spoiler. What I mean is that I loved them each so much that I just wanted them to be happy in the end, whatever that meant.

I loved this book so much and will definitely be reading it again.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

HAPPY PLACE is a candid look at love, relationships, friendship, and the pressures people put on themselves for others. Henry takes these six characters and captures a moment in their lives without the filter of perfection. The internal feelings, the reactions to situations, and the crazy fun antics one can only do with the best of friends are all on display within this book.

Honestly, the book was entertaining from beginning to end. The people the reader meets are flawed and fabulously real, making this type of book better for me. However, there were moments when I wanted more emotion. With all Harriet and Wyn went through, it felt like there was some skirting around a scene where it all came out in a bigger way. There was a moment towards the last section of the book where there is an explosion of pent-up emotions coming from one of the characters, and it was exactly what I wanted. I just wish more of the characters throughout the story had those expressions.

Yet, looking back at the journey our six friends turned family take, the author allowed them to grow, make realizations about themselves and the group, and even have a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments. HAPPY PLACE will no doubt be a place many readers will want to visit.

Highly Caffeinated Rating of… ☕ ☕ ☕ + 1/2

Emily Henry's books are my "happy place". In this story we follow Harriet and Wyn a couple since college who have recently broken up but have not told any of their friends. Insert a week away with said college friends where they have to pretend to still be together. But as the week pans out and there are surprises around every corner will Harriet and Wyn realizes that each other might be their happy place after all?

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review!

With great happiness, this will be the book that helped me break up with Henry. She just isn’t the author for me. The books aren’t very exciting, the covers don’t seem to fit the contents, the narrator of the audiobooks is the same every time. I tried, really I did as this is book number 4. For those looking for a beach read, she’s your gal. This title just dragged the couple pretending to keep face with their friends and having the guy try to win her back, while the gal just kept dealing with the past. It was dull. 😬#NetGalley #ARC

THE MIRROBALL GIRLY IN ME IS FOREVER CRYING
FIVE COSTAL GRANDMOTHER STARS
STANDING OVATION
ROUND OF APPLAUSE
WYN HAS MY ENTIRE HEART
i cant explain it but in my head wyn is basically connell from normal people but specifically paul mescal playing connell...
at this point EH could put my heart in a blender and i would say "thank you"
anyways, my costal grandmother aesthetic loving heart is happy.
someone pleaaaaase make this into a script and send it to reese witherspoon and nancy meyer

"Happy Place" by Emily Henry is another HEA romance that will keep readers turning the pages into the late hours of the night. I wasn't a fan of the use of the miscommunication trope but that may be more of a personal preference. The book shifts back and forth across the main character's timeline which can be a bit jarring at times.

There is a reason Emily Henry is one of my new favorites! She writes a good story, and it checks all of the boxes for me. Reads quickly, has good characters and a setting that makes me want to visit that location, this time Maine, and I need to now go to a beach house in Maine.

This book is ultimately about change, and how we can accept each other through those changes or lose each other. Really this is a theme that broadly shapes the last few years. The changes in this book test friendships and well as romantic relationships and family relationships. It's wonderful to watch the characters grow, and ultimately come together stronger than they started.

I loved this! I would have submitted it to library reads if I had gotten it read in time.

Thanks to Edelweiss for the advanced copy!

As always, I will read anything and everything Emily Henry writes! Book Lovers will always be one of my favorites. I couldn't wait to read this one! For me, it was hard to connect with this book and the characters. I enjoyed the past and present timelines along with the witty banter that I've come to love from Emily Henry. However, I am not a fan of the miscommunication trope and that seems like what every.single.person. in this book was guilty of doing! I wanted to yell at them to just HAVE A CONVERSATION!

Emily Henry is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Her books are always humorous with unique plots, yet very relatable, and very emotional! In Happy Place, Henry tells the story of a group of friends who are meeting up at their happy place--Sabrina's father's cottage in Maine--for the final time. Rather than basking in her favorite place, Harriett must now spend the week on edge with her ex-fiance, from whom no one knows she has split. Henry perfectly captures the feelings of growing up while trying not to grow apart from your best friends, as well as the extreme heartbreak of two people who can't be together, despite the love they have for one another. Happy Place is a great read!

As per usual, the banter in Henry's books are unmatched. The story follows two characters, going back and forth between past and present.
There is close-knit friendship in which they meet and how they grow together and do so apart.

This would be a perfect summer read and it will have the reader laughing and feeling all the warm fuzzies.

Happy Place is the latest book by Emily Henry. This one is about friendship and of course love too.

It's about best friends who met in college and who reunite once a year to spend time together in Coastal Maine where so many of their memories have been created.

The main couple is Harriet and Wyn who were best friends first, and after a year, they became more. Later on, engaged but in the present, they are not together anymore. Between two timelines past and present, we learned how they met, fell in love, and why they broke up.

In the present when Harriet arrives, she is surprised to see Wyn there, she never thought she was going to see him there again. She is shocked, to say the least, but the shocks keep on coming, her friend Sabrina is going to marry at the end of the week and the house they have loved for so many years is being sold!! So of course Harriet and Wyn need to fake being still together not to upset the dynamics despite not being a couple for the last six months. Harriet still loves Wyn so she is not sure how to navigate the situation without getting hurt further.

Happy Place had me wanting to go visit Maine right away and follow all the places they enjoyed and the food they ate. It also had me rooting for a happy ending for the main characters and for their friendship between the six to survive the passing of time.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

A complimentary copy was provided by Berkley via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A beautiful, nuanced romance that will sweep you away in a tangle of angst, deja vu, and longing. Fantastically written to keep you engaged and looking forward to the next time you have a few minutes to devour more.

The story was enjoyable but the whole premise made me so sad.

I was so excited to see a new Emily Henry book pop up on Netgalley a few months ago and I had to have it. I read the story plot, I really did, but I still wanted to read the new Emily Henry book since I enjoyed the last two. This is my warning that Beach House is not a laugh-out-loud comedy and you better have your box of tissues handy.

Harriet met her best friends in college, Sabrina and Cleo, along with Perth and his best friend, Wyn. The five of them lived together, first during college and then in New York during graduate school. And while they tried to keep each other in the friend zone for the sake of all their friends, Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick have been drawn to each other since the moment they met.

The highlight of their year would be when they got to spend a week at Sabrina's father's gorgeous beach house in Maine for an amazing summer vacation. While these best friends spent many years together in close quarters, life eventually gets in the way of friendship and everyone was off to their new grown-up lives. Cleo and her girlfriend had moved off to an update New York farm while Sabrina and Perth were both practicing law in New York City.

Harriet has always known she wanted to be a brain surgeon and was doing a grueling residency in San Francisco. It is so grueling that Harriet was planning to skip this year's beach house vacation, or more to the point, Harriet was avoiding her best friends as she hasn't wanted to tell them that Wyn had cancelled their wedding and left her to moved back to Montana to take of his mother.

Harriet's desire to avoid her friends gets thwarted by a call from Sabrina telling her that her father's new wife is making him sell the beach house and this would be their last opportunity for their annual get together. Harriet knows she will have to come clean about her and Wyn's breakup but not knowing if she should tackle that right away and possibly ruin the week, and she should wait until the bitter end. But that questions becomes moot when she walks in and find Wyn standing in the living room along with the announcement that marriage-phobic Sabrina has finally agreed to marry Perth at the end of this vacation. All because Harriet and Wyn's continued commitment to each other proves that long lasting love is possible.

Now Wyn and Harriet have to pretend to be the perfect, happy couple while each faux-loving moment with Wyn crushes Harriet's heart a little bit more each time.

THOUGHTS:
Every time I picked this book up to read, I put it back down and I ended up picking up another story to read. Even when I finally started it, I kept not wanting to pick it up again.

I don't mean to be contradictory when I tell you that Happy Place was a well-written story and when I was reading it, I was engrossed by the happenings and these characters. But is also a story that is going to be very busy stomping all over your emotions.

As many of us know, once adulting starts there is not as much time to spend with even our closest friends. There is work and house projects and kids and kid events. You try to make plans and someone undoubtedly cancels and everyone tries to reschedule but then it is months or years before you see them again. In this story these characters bonded during those glory years of college when you get that first taste of adulthood without the bills and responsibility involved in adulting. They had plenty of time to simply have fun with these people they cared most about. Since they finished their education, they have lost their close bond.

They are also losing the beach house which is the one last, strong connection they have to each other. It's the one thing that is sure to draw them back from wherever life has tossed them and they can spend one magical week together. They are now losing the place that makes them happy as well as feeling young and carefree once again.

Of course, the hardest hit to your emotions is the heartbreak of Harriet and Wyn. The story tosses us back and forth in time between their beginning and this last hurrah at the beach house. But whether we are in the past or the present, Wyn and Harriet have a tremendously strong bond so what happened to them? I almost wanted to flip the end to find out what happened, what could have possibly broke up these two people who clearly still care very deeply about each other. I caught right from the start that Wyn, although classically handsome enough to catch any woman's eye, doesn't think much of himself and he also thinks Harriet is brilliant. So brilliant that she is out of his league. Add to that more of that grown up adulting pressure and a severe bout of depression, and we end up with a perfect romance that is unraveling at the seams.

Generally I shy away from stories that going to make me cry. I read as escapism not to be dragged into someone's fictional depression but since I jumped in to this one, I can't deny that it was a compelling story with great characters that happily cha-cha'd all over my emotions.

Emily Henry continues to outdo herself. This book is filled with romance alongside the complexities of human emotions that are entangled in all types of relationships. I appreciate how Henry dove into how our parents' relationship with one another can impact the romantic attachments we have later on in life. Below is a link to the Feminist Book Club podcast that I was a part of that discussed our love for this book.

Emily Henry is by far my go-to authour for a perfect summer book. Any time I have customers coming looking for a good book to take with them on vacation, one of my first questions is 'have you read anything by Emily Henry?'. This book was another perfect read, I loved everything about it. As always I loved the love story between Harriet and Wyn. But I also love the side characters, and the story of their importance to the main characters. I loved this friendship group, and how friendship was at the root of this book. How your friends can become your chosen family. It's beautiful, and so well done.

I love Emily Henry! She's one of the authours that I recommend the most as a bookseller.