BEACH READ

 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.

Release Date: May 19, 2020

Berkley Penguin Books

Contemporary Romance

Review copy provided by publisher

Liza's Review:

I really enjoyed Beach Read. I have to say I would really characterize it more as fiction with romantic elements, but overall, the story was pretty enjoyable. January Andrews has moved into the lake house her father left her in his will...when she discovered he had a mistress in his hometown for years. When she moves into her father's house to prepare it to sell after breaking up with a longtime boyfriend, she discovers Augustus (Gus) Everett lives in the lake house next door. January always felt like she was in competition with Gus while in college, and she still feels that way upon first seeing him again.

I have to say I wasn't the biggest fan of January when the book started. She seemed pretty selfish and whiny honestly. I get she had been thrown for a loop when she learned about her dad, but she really made me mad that she totally distanced herself from her mom almost as a punishment for knowing about his mistress but not sharing with January. She was also a bit of a tool to Gus, who really seemed like a nice guy when we first met him. Thankfully, I kept reading and I quickly realized January was a much better person than she presented at the beginning of the story. She is classified as a romance writer, but I really felt like she was more of a women's fiction author the more she described her books, and I saw definite growth of her character over the course of the book.

I really liked Gus upon meeting him, and was so glad he and January honestly became true friends the more time they spent together. He had a bit of drama in his past, yet I didn't feel like he relished in the misery as much as January did initially. I felt like he helped January get to the point where she was willing to listen to find out the truth about her dad and accept so much about the past she didn't know. I also kinda loved they had a bit of a slow burn to a romance. I felt they were both attracted to one another from pretty much the moment they saw each other again, but them becoming friends first totally worked for me. While I felt Gus was in a much better place than January when I started reading Beach Read, I do have to say his character also grew and opened up more over the course of this story.

Beach Read was overall a pretty fun story. I did get frustrated with the characters a time or two, but ended up really loving where Ms. Henry took her readers. While Beach Read was the first book I've read by Emily Henry, it definitely won't be the last.

Rating: 4 Stars (B+)