Beach Read by Emily Henry

Rating: 3 stars

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I thought this was going to be a 5-star book for me, unfortunately that was not the case.

Beach Read by Emily Henry was one of my most anticipated reads. It focuses on January Andrews, a romance writer struggling from writer’s block after the recent passing of her father. As if grief wasn’t hard enough, she finds out that her father cheated on her mother at a beach house in a small town. She goes to said beach house, where she bumps into Augustus, an acclaimed author of literary fiction and her arch nemesis from college. They strike a deal – January will take Augustus on dates so that he can write a rom com and Augustus will take January on his research missions so that she can write a hard-hitting novel.

The premise of this book is what got my hopes up! It doesn’t really focus that much on the dates between January and Augustus. For the first 100 pages of the book, I was hooked. I was laughing at their banter and was genuinely interested to find out what would happen next. But sometime after that the book lost its way. There was SO MUCH filler! It became such a bore to read. There were several unnecessary descriptions of settings and pages and pages of internal dialogue. I just couldn’t stand it. I was literally counting down the pages, waiting for it to end.

The only reason I gave it 3 stars instead of 1 or 2 was because those first 100 pages were magical. I wish it had continued like that.

Also, the side plot about cults was just so random and made no sense. And the book that January wrote sounded plain weird.

Overall, a very disappointing read for me. I would not recommend it, but I seem to be in the minority.

Most Memorable Quote:

“If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don’t feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.”

Love,