A gem of a book - you know where its going to go from the beginning but the journey is such a pleasure! Poppy and Alex, two best friends since college, go on holiday year after year but are just friends despite the occasional fluttering or temptation that crosses Poppy's mind. There's a falling out - but then circumstances bring them back together, are they going to talk about whatever broke them apart for all those years? Very likeable characters, some beautiful settings and a very satisfying read. Loved it!

Poppy and Alex were adorable, I loved their friendhip and their travels. It was a great way of reading about the vacations we can't currently have. Their adventures were amazing, it was a bit confusing at first to be reading about all of them in the present and the past but it was a great way to maintain the mistery about what happened between them.

After absolutely loving Beach Read, I couldn’t wait for more romances from Emily Henry! SOLD. And to no one’s surprise, I fell head over heels for People We Meet on Vacation.

Poppy and Alex have been best friends since they first met during freshman orientation at college. They couldn’t be more opposite – Poppy is wild, impulsive, has wanderlust, and travels the world for a living. Alex is a homebody: he’s stable, level-headed, is living in the same town he grew up in, and works at the high school he attended. They have nothing in common, but they connect, and every summer since they met, they’ve gone on vacation together.

What amazing characters, I loved them. Cant wait for Henrys next book.

It's no doubt that Emily Henry is a talented writer who finds a way to engage the reader from the very first page.

Alex and Poppy's story is an opposites attract, friends to lovers slow building romance. It starts with many signs of unrequited love unknowingly from both sides. The more we dive into their friendship the stronger their bond becomes to the point they are too afraid to mess with the dynamic they have become comfortable with.

As much as I enjoyed the writing as well as Poppy and Alex's journey I did not like how a lot of it was interwoven with them and other love interests. I'm not the biggest fan of stories where the Main Characters spend part of (or most of) the story in serious relationships with people outside the main couple. I get that this is apart of life but in romance I personally do not enjoy it.

I still really like the Authors ability to tell a story in a way that makes me want to keep reading even when the subject matter or flow becomes frustrating. I'm excited to see what Emily comes up with next as she clearly knows how to create stories that leave a lasting impression.

You won't win any prizes for guessing how this one ends, but it doesn't make the journey there any less enjoyable. You and Me on Vacation is a really cute romance, that reminded me a bit of When Harry Met Sally.

The chemistry between the two was lovely, and didn't feel too clichéd. It took me a little while to get into it, but I suspect that could be a bit on my headspace, but once I hit about 40% I was hooked.

Unsurprisingly, it also made me really want to go on holiday (not ideal for living through pandemic). I really enjoyed this book, and if you are looking for a light read, I think you will too.

I have just finished reading this fantastic story. I should have been busy with everything at home but couldn't stop thinking about this book and how badly I needed to know how it was all going to end. I absolutely loved the story of Alex and Poppy, I was drawn in from the start, the way Emily writes really captures emotions and the feelings. Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy. I have read the last two books by Emily and loved them.

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy. I have read the last two books by Emily and loved them! Another great author to add to my beach author collection. I wasn't as interested in the previous years and found some things a little confusing while trying to keep it all straight. But i loved the NOW chapters. I'm so glad this book ended up with a happy ending!

She did it again. Everything Emily Henry touches turns to gold in my eyes. She has that Midas touch in romance and I honestly could read her grocery list and be happy with it.

I had such high hopes for this book and she did not disappoint. This one features my favourite tropes in romance books: friends to lovers.
This novel follows Poppy and Alex, friends since college, and the vacations they go on together every year, until suddenly, two years prior the start of the novel, something happened that changed something between them.

I simply cannot express how much I love Henry's writing and how she's able to pull the strings of my heart. I found myself laughing and crying even at times when maybe there was nothing to cry about, but this novel is just filled with pure feelings and love and I couldn't help myself.

The characters are so real you will find yourself rooting for them, sometimes you will want to drive some sense into them because they seem so oblivious, but in the end they are so human that you can't help but understand them.
And also I would like to praise Henry because there aren't a lot of friends to lovers romance novel that I loved with my entire heart. It is a trope I adore, but sadly since I have such high expectations sometimes I find myself disappointed. With this one I felt such joy that I really can't express in words.

She conquered my heart with Beach Read, but now, with this one, I can say for sure that Henry is one of my favourite romance writers if not my favourite of the last few years.
I really cannot find a single thing in this book I did not enjoy, maybe at the beginning I found the pacing to be a bit off, but after 30 or so pages, I was completely hooked.

Thank you again to the publishing house and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book early, I can't recommend it enough!

Really though that Emily couldn’t possibly write a better book after finishing beach read but here we are. Except from being my favourite book of 2021 so far, people we meet on vacation might be the best yes THE BEST, best friends to lovers book I’ve ever read.

This book has everything when it comes to a good friends to lovers book, you have the flashbacks pages, you have them meeting for the first time and getting to know each other, them being best friends that don’t have romantic feelings from the first time they meet, we see the whole build up and it’s an a wonderfully ride. Emily wrote an amazing book, so well written, her characters both Poppy and Alex are so interesting, you wish that you knew them in real life, they have flaws and they have their moments but they’re just trying to survive in this modern world.

God I could go on and on about this book, the plot is so fun to read it was so easy to get into this book, it was love at the first read for me. One chapter in and you’re basically in love with them and the friendship they share, Poppy is WILD she loves travelling she loves meeting new people, she’s so unapologetically her, she’s loud, funny without being the quirky female character, she’s a walking sunshine and we couldn’t leave her without a grumpy man by her side. And here we have Alex, ah such a dreamy man, a true gentleman, a teacher that’s also carrying around a six pack and does an irresistible puppy face. The calm to Poppy’s wildness simply couldn’t find a better match for each other.

Of course the whole book is not just rainbows, confessions and adventures, both of these people are trying to understand what they truly want from their life and whats the next step. Poppy comes to an understanding at the end of the book and some of the lines just hit too hard. This book had such a balance between the fun and the angsty moments, got everything I wanted from it!!! There’s this really cute parts that I can’t wait for you guys to read about Alex and his pda rules just makes me melt every time I read it. The idea of these two people never feeling alone when they’re with each other made me cry twice while reading it so get your tissues ready cause these two are gonna give you all the feels.

Truly can’t wait for Emily’s next book, her books are just so damn good so far, so thankful for her giving me people we meet on vacation as a die hard best friends to lovers fan, wish you all fall in love with alex and poppy as quickly as I did, just read this book go in blind and just enjoy !!!

Poppy and Alex have nothing in common and go out of their way to avoid each other while at college. A year passes until they are brought together for a car share to travel across the country, and an unusual friendship begins. Their friendship blooms, and so every year, they meet up for a vacation.


Poppy works for a travel magazine. She is outgoing, adventurous and impulsive, while Alex is a teacher, reserved and cautious. Everything works for the first ten years, but something happens, so they call an end to the holidays’ and their friendship. Two years pass before Poppy contacts Alex again.


What a great story this is! Its laugh out loud moments are brilliant. You know that they are coming, especially when new characters come into the story, but everything is unpredictable. The story plays out on different timelines, from the present day to years gone by and the hilarious situations they get into. The story works up to the year when everything fell apart.


These two are the stars of the story, with the others characters playing secondary roles. There is so much more to consider than just enjoying each others company. They live miles apart from each other, both have careers, their friends and their families. It is about risking everything. They have only ever known each other on vacation.


What a great love story, with belly, laughs all the way.

I wish to thank Net Galley and the publisher for an e-copy of this book which I have reviewed honestly.

BOOK REVIEW: You and Me on Vacation by @emilyhenrywrites

4.5 stars
Smut level 3.5/5

Emily Henry has done it again! I adored her book Beach Read and You and Me on Vacation is just as good. You know you love a book when you can't put it down and devour it in a day!

This story is about Poppy and Alex, two very different characters who become best friends that go on holiday with each other every summer. The book is told in the present tense but also with chapters of previous holidays throughout the book. It is a story about friendship, love and finding your home.
Poppy is such a wonderful vivacious lead female! She is such a joy to get to know and has a brilliant sense of humour. She is the kind of character you would want to be friends with. Alex is so different to Poppy but wonderful in his own right. I loved his more withdrawn personality juxtaposed against Poppy's vibrancy. I also adored how Poppy brought out the fun side of Alex and their humorous banter was so mich fun to read.
I won't go too much into the story as I don't want to give anything away but this is a beautiful love story and I enjoyed every single second of it.
Emily Henry has an amazing way of connecting her reader's with her characters and I felt so emotionally invested in this story.
There are some steamy scenes and the growing chemistry between Poppy and Alex is rather hot! Sexual tension for days! The sexy times are well written but definitely fitted the book and weren't too much or too little.
If you enjoy a romance with great humour, an emotional side and a little smut, then this is the book for you. I promise you will love Poppy and Alex as much as I did and I couldn't recommend it more.

Out 8th July
Please note that I was #gifted this book in exchange for an honest review.

3.5

I’m so between a 3 and 4 for this one. For the most part it’s super cute but I found myself getting confused between the time lines a lot like mid chapter of the past I’d forget and think it was present day and vice versa. Poppy and Alex were pretty cute, as far as contemporary romance books this was one of the better ones I’ve read. I’ve had Beach Read on my kindle for ages now and this has really spurred me on to finally pick it up this summer!

You and me on Vacation

I really enjoyed this sweet friends-to-lovers romance. The story spans Poppy and Alex’s 12 years of knowing one another and their relationship intensifies as the main characters figure out who they are and what they want from life. Alex is more of a homebody while Poppy is a jet-setter; determined and career driven. On paper they should never work but the slow-burn of their attraction is fuelled and impossible to ignore.

This book has all the ingredients of your favourite romance / romcom movies and books. It’s sure to be a summer hit!

5/5⭐️
Genre: contemporary romance / romantic comedy

I'm approaching this review in light of the fact that contemporary romance is not my usual genre. If you DO love contemporary romance, I think you'll REALLY love this one. The characters are incredibly endearing and have fantastic chemistry (almost a little *too* good for me to believe they went TWELVE years without boning each other's brains out. Chemistry in a friends-to-lovers story treads a fine line if it wants to be believable). If you want to reminisce about pre-covid style travel (or for me, pre-kid), there's definitely a lot here for you too.

Poppy and Alex are opposites who somehow get along excellently, and every year they take a summer holiday together. This book is told in an alternating now and then style, mixing the current day with with Poppy and Alex's ten previous trips. Yes, that's right we experience in a fair amount of detail, all TEN of their previous holidays, as the present day inches forward. I have to admit that this dragged a little for me. I guess I'm an impatient reader. I like *forwards* plot movement. By the third historical holiday, I was starting to groan every time that little X NUMBER OF SUMMERS AGO heading popped up and was mentally counting down in my head - "omg so I need to get through seven more of these dang holidays just to find out what happens??"

So I'd call this a very character focused novel. The characters are very fleshed out down to the tiniest detail. Admirable, certainly. A little boring? Maybe, depending on the reader. If you like character studies, you're in the right place.

The present day pace picks up in the final 40% and I found I had to keep reading at that point and didn't want to put it down. The first 60% definitely laid the groundwork in terms of character history. Just for me it was a liiiiitle slower paced than I usually prefer.

I have to say I REALLY liked the presence of therapy in the resolution to the story, and the idea that you need to figure out your own sh*t before jumping into a relationship and expecting it to fix you. That was really good and something I really applaud. Alex was such a wonderful, caring male character, so big points there too.

SLIGHT SPOILER SECTION
There was one thing that kind of bugged me in the resolution, and that was Poppy's epiphany that what she truly loved about travel was the people you meet, and then she goes on to incorporate that into her career pivot. I can see that her career stagnancy needed to be tied up for the ending to be satisfying, but I felt this kind of came out of left field, cos we've just read a whole book about all her holidays, and we didn't SEE her meeting new people or enjoying that aspect at all! The main thing she loved about her holidays was spending time with Alex. And no, we don't want to make a dude our reason for living, but it's a little hard to buy into this epiphany we're told about when we didn't actually SEE that play out in their travel at all. For me it was a huge case of telling without actually showing, and it made that bit feel random and plonked in. This is part of the reason I feel the UK title fits the story approximately one MILLION times better than the US one, and I don't get why it has two titles.
SPOILERS OVER

Overall this story definitely succeeded in making me really care about these characters and if you don't mind a story that stops and smells the roses, you'll be rewarded with some pretty warm fuzzies.

I really enjoyed Emily's debut Beach Read, so had high hopes for this one and it definitely lived up to them.

I struggled with the jumps between present day and the past to begin with, but once I really got into it I couldn't stop. I loved Poppy and Alex's relationship - their friendship, the mutual pining and the real deep love that they had for eachother.

It was a wonderful read, that had me laughing and crying, and definitely lived up to the Beach Read hype!

I didn’t like this book and I have absolutely no idea why, so this review is probably going to be mostly rambling. There’s really nothing wrong with it on paper, but it didn’t do anything for me—which comes as a real surprise, considering Beach Read was my favorite 2020 contemporary.

I struggled with both of our main characters a lot. It took a long time for me to find Poppy even remotely bearable and Alex just didn’t excite me at all. I’m a millennial who has absolutely nothing figured out, but, for some reason, I just couldn’t get on board with Poppy and Alex’s millennial struggles. I don’t need to relate to characters to connect to them, but they felt really out of touch for me, Poppy especially.

I really enjoyed the mix of flashbacks and the present day. I think there was a great balance between them and the pacing was great as a result. A few of my favorite tropes also made an appearance and were done well.

I’m a sucker for that moment at the end of a romance where everything falls apart but this just felt unnecessarily painful. Honestly, I kind of thought the author was building up to something much worse from like the halfway point, but it didn't happen. I spent so long with this pit of dread in my stomach that I couldn’t really enjoy ending.

Overall, this book has left me very confused. Objectively, it’s not a bad book in the slightest, and on paper, it feels like the perfect book for me, but I just didn’t connect with the story or the characters. I find it really hard to come away from a book disliking it and not be able to explain it, but a story and a reader just aren’t the right fit for each other, and I think that’s what’s happened here. This is definitely still a must-read for romance lovers, especially if you enjoyed Beach Read as much as I did.

I read Emily Henry’s ‘Beach Read’ last year, so I knew I was in for a treat with ‘You and Me on Vacation’, and I definitely wasn’t disappointed. If anything, I’m missing travelling even more now, and I really wish I could have summer holidays now!

I really like Poppy and Alex’s friendship and interactions throughout the book, both in the past and present. I’m not normally fun of so many flashbacks or chapters with backstories, but here, they felt more necessary and gave us insights into the developing friendship (and feelings) between both characters over the years. I loved how different they were, but how they complemented each other, and suited in a particular way. Both Poppy and Alex are super likeable characters and I have enjoyed following their journey very much. Their friendships, past relationships, people they met on holidays, and their interactions with their families were great, and make them feel more real, honest and raw.

While in some ways, I think I have enjoyed ‘Beach Read’ more – perhaps because both of the characters being writers and the particular set up of the book –‘You and Me on Vacation’ was a definitely great read. I really wish I could read it somewhere while travelling, maybe on the beach. But for now, I can only escape in the pages of this book.

In some ways, ‘You and Me on Vacation’ is a typical rom-com with a friends-to-lovers trope, but it was such a fun read, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an uplifting read with charming characters. Emily Henry is definitely on my to-read list for any future contemporary romances, they’re a treat!

5⭐ - just YES to this whole book 💛

To play off of a continuing theme from the book........all rom-coms should ASPIRE to be as good as this one!

It's genuinely laugh out loud funny.
Alex and Poppy are a wonderful couple and the book doesn't make the mistake of trying to be too deep, but it also doesn't come across as corny or superficial.
Instead it's a heartfelt story of two people, who want different things in life, learning to change and adapt for each other.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted copy.

You and Me on Vacation follows Poppy and Alex over the course of 12 years from Poppy's perspective. The present timeline focuses on Poppy at her travel writer job and the trip she takes with Alex to Palm Springs, two years since they last spoke. The past timelines follow the pair from college age as they take vacations every summer, sometimes in relationships with other people.

My favourite part of the book was the present timeline as the two battle the Palm Springs summer heat with broken air-conditioning and the little things that go wrong on budget holidays. I also liked the insights into their past holidays.

My main issue with the book was that I found it really hard to like the central characters. I found Poppy to be irritating and Alex to be a bit of a doormat. I found it really hard to get behind their holidays together, especially when Alex was in a serious relationship with another woman, Sarah. No wonder Sarah was jealous, it's obvious that Alex is in love with Poppy even if he doesn't realise it at the time. Of course men and women can be friends but Poppy and Alex would make any of their partners insecure because their is a romantic connection between them.

Anyway, I enjoyed the idea behind the book, and loved the realistic holidays, but just didn't find myself connecting to the central characters which took me out of the story at times, especially because there is so much dialogue. I think the book would have benefited from Alex's point of view too.

I liked this one by Emily Henry, just didn't love it. I still look forward to her other stories. As much as I love When Harry Met Sally, this one just fell a bit short for me.