Book Lovers

Reading a book that is everywhere-buzzworthy is a precarious thing. I was afraid that was the case with my first official summer read. But I’m blaming that initial fear on the first 67 pages being read at night during the last week of school (not sure there’s anything that can keep an exhausted teacher’s attention late at night during the final days of a frazzled school year). Because the last 310 pages were devoured overnight—on my first official day of Summer Break. I laughed out loud (a lot); I was surprised; my heart hurt in moments; I loved the people, the place, and the plot. In short, this book has the answer to one of its central questions: can you have it all? The answer for this book is yes—yes, there are books that show more have it all, and this was the perfect one to start off my summer reading. show less

Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Read: March 2023

Nora! Omg! What can I say! She’s a badass, hardworking city gal, who knows exactly what she wants and I loved her! I don’t think I’ve ever connected with a character as much as her.

I love how this book doesn't change Nora or punish her for being ambitious and career driven. I loved that she didn’t want kids and wasn’t ashamed of that. I loved the connection she had with Charlie and that he was able to say all the right things to her. I love that he didn’t push her to stay in Sunshine Falls because he knew she would be unhappy there. I loved the relationship she had with her sister and how hard it was for her to let her go and live her own life. It was all show more just perfection!

And that ending! It was so incredibly wholesome! I loved every second of this book and there is a very high chance that I will listen to it again. show less

How dare you. [not a question]

You make fun of and poke holes in all the tired cookie cutter tropes that romance books (& movies) rely on too heavily. But your audacity wasn’t using every single one of those f’ing tropes in this book. No. Your flex is using them in a way that they’re not only forgivable… but good. All while you tell us that they’re overused! I’ll be furious when I finish crying over the ending.

Slightly steamier than I tend to prefer. And I spent too long hating a certain character that I haven’t come to terms with the spring-loaded redemption arc. But damn.

I acquired Book Lovers entirely by accident and read it pretty much on a whim, but it was one of the more enjoyable and well-written contemporary romances I've read.
The Hallmark trope turned on its head concept drew me in immediately, and something about the characters & settings provided a really "lived-in" quality that gave me all the cozy summery vibes I occasionally crave without any of the redundancy of plot I usually find myself mired in when I do.
I really enjoyed the writing style as well; it was very crisp & descriptive, almost like you could feel the texture of the words.
Nora and Charlie's story (and Nora & Libby's as well) felt familiar in the best kind of way, like a favorite toy or a hot drink on a cold day.

Book Lovers is, I think, where I part ways with Emily Henry. I don’t think she’s developing as a writer in a direction I want to go in. The opening chapters had me excited because there’s an initial meta element/sense that we were getting something deliberately heightened to be a knowing parody of a Hallmark movie, but that quickly fizzled out. It became clear that rather than trying to do something a little more complex, Henry was just signalling up front that this would be corny, that she knew it was corny, and that she wasn’t going to do anything about it.

Henry writes some truly enjoyable banter—it’s one of the things about Book Lovers I liked most—but you can’t hang a whole book on that. She also has some skill in show more creating complex POV characters, but she doesn’t know how to craft a narrative around them. For me, Book Lovers combined and even amplified the problems I had with Henry’s previous books: it’s got the tonal inconsistencies of Beach Read and the lack of relationship suspense of People We Meet on Vacation.

There was also a persistent disjuncture between what the book was telling us and what it was showing us. We’re repeatedly told that Nora has a reputation in the publishing world of being a shark—but rather than showing us someone who’s out for blood, all Henry put on the page was a woman who’s a workaholic and frankly kind of a pushover for clients who’ve got no boundaries. She also has, uh, dubious professional taste. The book-within-a-book here sounds so awful—even more sentimental than Book Lovers itself—and its very existence broke my suspension of disbelief in a couple of key ways. How on earth would an editor be able to successfully work on a book that’s delivered in parts that are continuously being rewritten? How would they have a sense of the overall shape of the book they’re working on? Not to mention the fact that the author of said book-within-a-book is very clearly writing a thinly-veiled fictional version of Nora, and that is never really addressed? Clarified? Explained? The moment where Nora realises what the book is about was one of the emotional beats of the book that actually affected me, because her hurt and mortification were so believable and justified—and then that storyline just gets dropped?

Nora and her sister Libby are so unhealthily codependent, and Henry is definitely aware of that but not fully enough, I don’t think. Each of them tries to manage the other in ways that are unhealthy. In ways large (Libby leaves her husband and two toddlers alone for three weeks while heavily pregnant with medical complications in order to pull a kind of emotional long-con on her sister?) and small (Nora kisses her pregnant sister’s stomach?) Admittedly maybe the latter example mightn’t bother some people, but I like to think that my younger sister and I are quite close and if I’d kissed her belly while she was pregnant she would at a minimum be asking me to cop myself the fuck on. The epilogue definitely should have featured both of them being in therapy to address their issues.

Add this a bunch of other issues—the book’s way too long; the town in which much of it takes place makes no sense—and I found myself skim-reading a bunch of the last section of Book Lovers just to be done with it. Not what you want in a romance novel.

(Also, is it just me, or did anyone else wonder if Emily Henry wasn’t getting product-placement kickbacks from Peloton for this one? Yikes.) show less

Nora Stephens is a literary agent and quite possibly the inspiration for every Big City work-obsessed girlfriend who gets dumped by the male lead to run off with the girl from a small town at the end of a rom com. After her latest break-up, Nora's sister, Libby, convinces Nora to take a break and spend three weeks in a small town in North Carolina. Nora reluctantly agrees and is astounded shortly after their arrival to bump into Charlie Lastra, the one editor in all of New York City she'd least expect to find in a small town. While Nora and Charlie don't really get along, in the nature of life in a small town, they continue to run into each other and when their work lives conspire to throw them together too, it's not long until sparks show more fly.

I really loved this book. It's an excellent send up of romance tropes while also hitting all the beats I love about the genre. It is also very, very funny. I was regularly laughing aloud and sharing passages with my longsuffering husband. Add in the bookish element of both Nora and Charlie working in the publishing industry and this book couldn't be more my kind of catnip if it tried. Highly recommended. show less

Nora Stephens travels to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, to reconnect with sister Libby, who has a list of small-town things for them to do on their trip. Sunshine Falls is the setting for the best-selling book that Nora, New York City native, book agent, and city girl to a T, had tried to sell to editor Charlie Lastra over a disastrous lunch. When exploring the town, she meets - who else - Charlie himself, who is working at his parents' bookstore.

I do love a good enemies-to-lovers story, and enjoyed this one with its oodles of literary references as Nora and Charlie are both in the business. Nora is convinced that she's the city girl everyone leaves behind, and I liked the way that trope was played with throughout. Nora and Libby's show more relationship is realistic with a strong back story, and I particularly liked moments of the sisters realizing that they had shared memories but differences in their interpretations. The story is in Nora's first-person narration, and the only downside of that is that we don't get to see Charlie's point of view and I would've liked to see what was going on in his head some. A lot of humor and some heart-wrenching moments make this one a winner for me. show less