Jess's Reviews > Happy Place

I know that my bar is extremely high for Emily Henry and that my expectations are insane….but this book did not live up to the hype. I just got really bored reading it. When I read PWMOV, I was on vacation in Costa Rica and I was so engrossed that I chose to stay in my hotel room all day reading instead of going on a hike to see sloths (and I love sloths)! For comparison, this book took me 2 weeks to read and I had all the time in the world to read it. 😬 That said, Emily Henry could write about her grocery list and it would still be better than anything I could ever come up with.

Here are the things I loved:

-Harry’s relationship with her family. I don’t think I’ve ever read this kind of family dynamic in a book before and it felt really refreshing to me. The MCs relationship with parents is always either really good or really bad. The indifference and slight coolness of her parents felt very real to me.
-Wyn’s parents. They were much more of the cliche “romance parents” but I thought the topics of grief were interesting.
-Chosen family 💕
-The setting. This book made me so nostalgic for Maine. We don’t deserve Maine.
-Recreational drug use - the festival scene was so fun
-The theme around the tipping point where everything is about to change from young adulthood to “real” adulthood and how your friendship will change.
-Topics of depression and low self-esteem
-I like that the sister & Harry hadn’t become best friends by the end of the book. Their ending felt realistic.
-Cleo was so real for calling out how absurd it was that they spent a whole day of their last Maine vacation together INDOORS watching hours of bad movies at a movie theater instead of just talking and spending time together.
-The shower scene

……

Now, the things I didn’t love:

-God, Wyn was so boring! He felt one dimensional compared to Gus, Alex, and Charlie
-Harry was a really shitty friend, even ignoring all the lying about her breakup. She didn’t even bother making any solo time with her friends and she only offered to do something special for her best friends wedding THE DAY BEFORE and only because she needed a distraction!
-Sabrina & Kimmy were caricature of real people.
-The dialogue felt cheesy and unrealistic at time, which pains me to say because EH is so good at dialogue.
-I hope if my ass friend was grinding on my boyfriend’s lap in a public place while having dinner with my friends, my friends would slap me across the face. I think the scene was attempting to build tension but it was soooo cringe.
-Why would Sabrina’s dad listen to his new wife and sell the house that was important to his family? He’s been married a million times so he hardly seems like the more thoughtful or concerned partner. Felt like kind of a plot hole?
-No seriously, how is Harry going to pay back her medical student loans by working at a pottery shop?