Andie’s Book Club: Beach Read by Emily Henry

I guess I’m a sucker for an Emily Henry novel. And I’m okay with that. I find her stories to be well told. Her characters are well-defined and complex. And she’s very good at dangling that carrot just out of reach, so I’m sure that what I think will happen won’t. I mean … no one really wants to know the end before the end, do they? 

Beach Read by Emily Henry is no different. There are times I love the main characters, January and Gus, individually. And there are times I think each of them is making terrible decisions, just like real life. God knows I’ve left plenty of conversations with acquaintances, wondering how they get through the day, making such bad decisions. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t.

Beach Read follows January, a struggling writer whose father has passed and she inherited his Michigan beach house. The house is situated next to a seemingly Grumpy Gus - aptly named Gus - who just happened to be her college writing rival.

What I love most about Emily Henry’s writing is that I feel like I’m living in the characters. As a happily married mother of two, I don’t expect I’ll ever feel those falling-in-love feelings again - and that’s not sad. I’m lucky to have what I do! But there is something magical about those early, fizzy, falling-in-love feelings, and Henry taps into them so well that I can almost feel them again.

But Beach Read isn’t just a romance. It’s a story about grief, about complicated relationships, about navigating emotions and mental health. It’s shocking at times, sultry at others, and often deeply sentimental.

By the time you close the last page of Beach Read, you’ll feel like you’ve traveled through a whole landscape of emotions—and maybe even accomplished something just by taking the journey.