~ 3.5 stars ~ ╰┈➤ (after rereading)

went ahead and bottled the whole book into a reading soundtrack, so if you feel like needing one, just tune in: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0PDRxErniHRfGEHD8y7aAO?si=962757d3ecba423f. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ a very unnecessary but totally necessary ranking of all emily henry books to find out which one speaks to me the most: #1. beach read — january × gus ➳ 3.5 stars #2. (tbd — the list is prone to a lot of change in the future)

why set out on this noble (re)reading quest, you ask? try cold, unfiltered fury. that's why. nothing gets me moving quite like witnessing an upcoming book adaptation that feels like being crafted by people who never so much as cracked the spine of the source material. so here iam, embarking on a full emily henry summer—chronologically, obviously—and i intend to stay committed from beginning to end, petty to the core.

beach read gave me exactly what i sign up for with romance fiction these days: a love story with some added depth to earn a title bigger than simply a "love story". funnily enough, there isn't enough beach, despite it being right there in the title and the book being set an ocean's whisper from one. kinda amusing, not gonna lie.

okay, sass aside for a second—the book itself seems a little unsure what it wants to be when it grows up. it's about a dozen things at once: grief, romance, learning to love again after heartbreak, a genre-swap writing experiment. all of them fighting for space in the same 350 pages, so something's always getting elbowed out. the subplots don't stay woven through—they surface, duck under, resurface, like they're playing a game of whack-a-mole nobody agreed to.

a similar unevenness follows january and gus. they're cute, sure, but their chemistry didn't win me over until a good 60% into the book. i didn't buy the "it's always been you" either. and can we please retire the "mandatory" mid-book make-out session? not every couple needs one—especially not the one that needed more genuine emotional friction first to really sell their initial rivalry and make the healing arc actually land instead of just showing up because the plot said so.

arguably the most interesting thread—the writing bet—gets buried under information on how many words january cranked out per evening after downing a bottle of wine. and there is a lot of wine. they're literally getting hammered every three chapters. it's a personality trait at this point (derogatory).

you can tell this is emily henry's first adult romance. there's this first-pancake energy to it. a little too much batter, not quite the right heat, but you can already taste what she's going for. there are some lulls that need filling, but the voice? funny, warm, self-aware—genuinely the kind of writing i'd annotate a grocery list for if she wrote one. i lived for the humour, the bickering, a genuine, healthy and honest female friendship (been waiting for this one, thank you very much), and the love confession at the end was so good i practically melted on the spot.

because here's the thing about emily: she has the ability to convince you how earnest love can be, even mid-eye-roll. they say if a writer loves you, their writing makes you immortal. turns out that's true of more than people. it can be true of feelings, of ideas, of whole aspects of living. beach read isn't perfect. it's rushed in places, uneven in others, occasionally a little lost in its own subplots. but the way emily henry writes, she still makes me believe romantic love can be beautiful.

~ 1.75 stars ~

it's been a while since i closed a book and had exactly zero ideas on what to do with the wreckage of rather negative feelings left behind. congratulations to every summer after on that rare achievement, i suppose.

going in, i expected a soft summer romance (with a side of spice ofc) that would leave me giddy over sun-drenched nostalgia at a lake cottage, watching a childhood friendship slowly ripen into something more—tested by time and distance, although we all know they find their way back to each other eventually. instead that expectation sank straight to the bottom of the lake while the reality turned out to be quite a mess. not the endearing kind.

so let me be messy with my thoughts, because if a book gets to unravel, so do i. fair's fair.

i've read enough friends-to-lovers stories to call it one of my favourite dynamics in fiction, which means i've also developed a sort of low tolerance for books that fumble it (in my humble opinion). if anything, every summer after was a masterclass in just how delicate this trope really is—proof that certain set-ups get you hooked on reflex alone, whether or not the story ever brings them out fully. however, sometimes things don't go this smoothly. you can tell me they're childhood best friends turned soulmates as many times as you like. but if the book never bothers to show me, iam not buying it.

take the two leads, who both individually and as a couple, are built out of cardboard dressed up as characterisation. their actions never really line up with the people they're supposedly written to be, and that inconsistency leaves them far too flimsy to carry the plot on their shoulders—which is a real setback since romance novels live and die by the strength of their characters and relationships between them.

sam is only seemingly written as a gentleman who yearns. on the page, he's a communication-deficient coward (sorry, not sorry) dispensing mixed signals like complimentary towels at a hotel that's only fancy on the outside. percy, for her part, is extremely committed to informing us how good his face looks. still, a good bone structure can scarcely make up for an actual personality. almost as if character depth checked in at the front desk, but never made it up to the room.

percy herself could've read as not your typical sunshine. she's warm and golden only around the people who already know her, yet she doesn't really believe it herself; underneath, she's a people-pleaser who drops the performance the instant she's around someone who doesn't demand it of her—and yet the book doesn't really dig into it. it just lets her collapse into her own bad decisions and calls the collapse depth, when really it's the same performance, just turned inward. and the constant need for performance similarly stretches into the romance, as if something this messed up could've gotten solved over one weekend.

here's the thing: reading about women in love is truly one of the loveliest experiences fiction has to offer. there's something genuinely beautiful about it, and i often find it more compelling than following a man venturing the same path. however, in this book, we get this strangely recurring trend of characters genuinely thinking the fastest route to a mindblowing love confession from your longtime crush is through dumb jealousy, chased by even dumber emotional cheating. furthermore, percy reads like she misplaced every brain cell that might remind her the world doesn't orbit her, herself and her feelings alone or that keeping boys on standby "for practice" until the real one circles back is, in fact, exactly the shit it sounds like.

i'd respect the hustle a bit more if percy and sam's relationship gave me a single reason to believe in it. what's sold as a lifelong bond is actually built on avoidance, miscommunication, and emotional shortcuts that never once earn their payoff. they spend more time apart than as friends (six as opposed to twelve years), and both of them are stuck at thirteen years old with zero emotional growth to show for it—which is kind of a problem when your story is supposed to span almost two decades. time is supposed to do something to people, don't you think?

and the plot twist i saw coming from miles away—the summer i turned pretty already traumatised me enough when it comes to love shapes involving two brothers.

the summer vibes definitely make for a sort of enjoyable reading experience, though i was less reminded of a lake and more of a beach—that feeling of sand slipping through your fingers with no way to grasp it solid? that's, sadly enough, every summer after in one sentence from me.