Hi! It’s Annie!
It’s been a very long time since I’ve written that and I apologize for the radio silence over what has now been years. Life changes, a lot, and life certainly also gets very busy. For example; full time jobs, Master’s degrees, and even a fiancee. And while my life only seems to get busier, I do feel a disconnect from myself when I’m not writing. Not having this blog has made me feel like I left a part of myself behind. Sooooo….I’m really excited to get back to it! That was my long and very rambly way of saying that I really missed this. And my shiny new Master’s degree also means that there’s a specific topic I am even more qualified to talk about: Books!!!! I have read a lot, in fact I have only been reading more as the years go on. I totaled at seventy books last year, so really that’s gotta go somewhere. Anyone who has read my posts on this blog also knows that I’m a HUGE fan of romance and I have read a few Emily Henry novels. Coincidentally the three that I’ve read are the three that they randomly decided to make into movies. And while I ended up falling in LOVE with ‘Happy Place’ and it is now one of my comfort reads, ‘People we Meet on Vacation’ was by far my least favorite of those books. Despite that, I was optimistic that maybe this movie would be really cute and it was? I say it like that because…well you’ll see. I’m just going to get into my thoughts on the book and how that informed my watch of the movie.
Warning: SPOILERS ahead for both the book and the movie! You have OFFICIALLY been warned.
Summary: Poppy and Alex are friends who meet once a year, every year, to go on vacation together. But don’t worry you guys they are seriously ONLY FRIENDS!! That is until they start catching feelings and things get really messed up. Now they are back together for one last vacation, but can they salvage what they had? Or will something new emerge?
The Book
As I stated before, I really didn’t like this book. Emily Henry isn’t one of my auto-buy authors and that is absolutely not to say that I don’t like her work. It’s just that my heart kind of belongs to the quirky stylings of Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry can be a bit hit or miss for me. As in, sometimes some of her books (cough ‘Happy Place’ cough) hit me right in the feels and others just miss completely and I feel like they come across a little too normal. Like an “I’ve seen this before” type of normal. A book from her really has to have a premise that grabs me for me to want to read it. And ‘People We Meet on Vacation’ admittedly didn’t have that for me when I started it. A friend of mine actually really loved it and I wanted to know what had her so obsessed. My first issue was that the vacation story that was really supposed to take me away was set in Palm Springs of all places. As someone who has lived way too close to the California desert all her life, this wasn’t really an escape for me. I completely and fully understand that this is a me problem and has nothing to do with the enjoyable nature of the book. But that was already a red flag that I wasn’t going to enjoy it as much as I hoped. Other than this pesky setting situation, the book is not bad. The plot isn’t bad at all. I have two major issues with this book and that is the characters and (please don’t kill me) the romance.
Now I know this is absolutely going to drive some people away. Poppy is a character who many people absolutely adore and I don’t want to say that those people are wrong. It is always a magical feeling when you read a book and so closely identify with a character, but there were a few things that really made it difficult for me to get behind her. Firstly, she comes off as really selfish several times in the book. Maybe I felt this way somewhat because I am an introvert like Alex, but there were times during their vacations where I felt as though she was pushing his boundaries. Like trying to make him do things that he didn’t necessarily think was fun, such as the whole tent scenario. She also kind of shames him for deciding to be a High School teacher at one point and she keeps him at arms length except for when they are on vacation, until he starts dating someone else and then she sort of goes behind his new girlfriend’s back because she suddenly decides she wants him. I do really like that the book has a scene where Poppy apologizes to Sarah, but I don’t think it truly makes up for what Poppy did in that scenario to completely undermine her relationship. On the other side of things, I’m also not a huge Alex fan. He can come off as pretentious at times and it feels like he’s constantly undermining Poppy’s job and lifestyle. I understand that the point of the book is that it’s important to have a life of your own rather than just constant vacations. But while I think that Poppy was running away from having a life, I don’t think her job or her lifestyle have anything to do with that. You can travel constantly and that can still be a life. The problem here was her unwillingness to let herself be emotionally vulnerable with anyone and putting herself on the back-burner because of that. I would argue that her having an absolute dream job that is travel journalism is a life. Alex’s pushback against that felt like he was misunderstanding and disrespecting the life that she had already built for herself. I didn’t completely buy the relationship because of this. They felt like they had two very different ideas of what life was and both were valid to a degree. And because of this and their inability to empathize with each other, I just didn’t buy their relationship.
The Movie
I will say this about the movie, it is a very faithful adaptation of the book. I don’t say that in the way that they didn’t change anything at all, but in the way that it pretty much faithfully covers the meat of the book and the way it portrays the characters. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I quite remembered what I didn’t really enjoy about the book until I watched the movie. It was a great refresher because it was so close to the book! There’s a reason why fans of the book are loving this movie and if you are one of those fans, I think you are going to adore this movie! As book adaptations go, it’s a great book adaptation and as rom-coms go, it’s an objectively good rom-com. But I do wish that the characters might have strayed at least a little because I really wanted to get behind the couple in this movie. I will at least say that I enjoyed the setting a lot more! I will take a change from Palm Springs to Barcelona any day; that’s just leagues better. I will also admit, Poppy and Alex have a couple more cute romantic gestures in this movie that they don’t have in the book. However, the relationship problems that I observed in the book are still going strong here. These two characters seem to have an inability to fully understand how the other person views life. I felt Poppy was slightly more likable in the movie than I found her in the book (just slightly, she still does what she does to Sarah), but that just meant that the ending felt even more strange to me. I just couldn’t help but feel like she was settling for the typical view of what “settled down” looks like when she had already built herself a life that she did like. I continue to believe that Poppy’s lifestyle was not the problem, she obviously enjoyed it, I just think that the way she treated it was an issue.
I think that there’s a change in the way younger people are viewing the work industry. While we’ve had this very generational view that settling down means having a 9-5 job with occasional holidays off, a family, and maybe a week of vacation every year, we’re beginning to see young people in particular push against that. And for good reason. When housing prices skyrocket and now everyone is working 8-6 for what feels like less money, people are going to start questioning whether all of this is even worth it. The search for making money in more unconventional ways has never been higher as has the idea that people should be able to live their lives in the way that they want. And that means valuing what you want to do just as much as you value where your money comes from. Watching this movie reminded me of how book Alex and Poppy very much reminded me of the opposite sides of this spectrum. Poppy represents the pushback of the younger generation while Alex clings onto this settling down idea. And I don’t necessarily think that the happy ending here should be that Poppy eventually caves and quits her dream job. I don’t think that an unconventional lifestyle means that Poppy is living her life wrong. I just think that if your job is vacation then you’re going to need a vacation from vacation and that means a home life. To me, that should have been the ending here. She keeps her job and she learns the advantages of having a life outside of work. I don’t feel that the ending should be a person with a more conservative view of what life looks like making the person who loves her job settle for something else. And I think that speaks to the fact that these characters are just not meant for each other. Now being in a long-term relationship I can tell you honestly, you don’t have to settle in your relationship. A good partner will understand your views on life and will support them even if they don’t fully ascribe to them one hundred percent of the time. Although, it is still important to find a person who wants to live the lifestyle that you also want to live. That will quite literally be the way that both of you are living your lives.
Now this is definitely not to say that I don’t think Emily Henry can write compatible characters because she can. Harriet and Wyn in ‘Happy Place’ are characters who beat all the odds to prove that they are compatible and those characters have boat loads of empathy for each other and their friends. I personally feel like that couple is the exact opposite of this one. I’m just of the general opinion that any relationship that begins with cheating or even the hint of cheating is doomed to fail. So while there were cute moments throughout the movie and the book, I just can’t get behind these characters and especially not them as a couple. But if you watch this movie just for Emily Bader as Poppy, I would understand. As much as I am very unsure about Poppy as a character; Emily Bader was so incredibly charming and I would love to see her in more rom-coms going forward! All that aside, if you take one unpopular opinion away from this review let it be this; I feel like ‘People We Meet on Vacation’ is about a woman who settles for a guy who doesn’t understand her (even though I also think she doesn’t make much of an effort to understand him either, but at least she didn’t make him settle), and I think that young people have every right to push for a lifestyle that looks very different from what the classic example of “settling down” is.
See you across the pond!
Sincerely, Annie
Oreos & Peanut Butter 