Beach Read Review

by Emily Henry

Rating: 4/5

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no-one will fall in love. Really.

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Content Warning: death of a parent (off-page). Chronic illness of a family member, past physical abuse 

This was a nice cozy beach read. Pun very much intended.

But no, seriously, I did thoroughly enjoy this book. I found it to be endearing while also cliche at times. But I didn’t want to put it down. Though I didn’t find any of it wildly unpredictable, watching it all unfold was fun and entertaining. 

I thought the premise was definitely interesting. We follow January, who’s dad recently passed away and at his funeral, she’s approached by his mistress with a letter and keys to a beach house back in his hometown. January is shocked and angry to discover this secret. On top of it all, January is a romance writer, and is struggling to write anything remotely happy. So she decides to spend the summer at the beach house in hopes the change in scenery will help her meet her deadline. However her neighbor is an old college crush and enemy, Augustus, who’s also a writer. Except he writes thrillers, and also in a rut. So as a joke, they make a bet to write a book in the other’s respective genre and show each other their research tactics.

As soon as we understand everything going on, its quite obvious, to me, as to how things are going to play out. But I didn’t enjoy it any less. I genuinely loved their little friendly bet, neither had anything to lose and they helped each other out of their ruts with their plan. And seeing the sometimes ridiculous research outings they made each other do was quite entertaining to watch. More so when it came to the romance research for Augustus. As we was quite the grump. The grumpy sunshine trope was very prevalent in this one, but oh so sweet.

Overall, I found this to be an easy cozy romance. Just what I needed after a prior heavier read. If you enjoy grumpy sunshine romances, I highly recommend picking this one up!