If you love novels where unresolved sexual tension drives the plot, Emily Henry’s new book, Happy Place, will sate your appetite. Take two people with enough mutual chemistry to blow up a laboratory, confront them with escalating dilemmas, and hang on for the ride. Henry, a New York Times bestselling author, has parlayed the thwarted love formula into a string of three previously wildly successful books.
Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since college, the envy of everyone. Six months ago, for undisclosed reasons, they broke up, but haven’t told a soul. Especially not the close-knit group of friends with whom, for the past decade, they’ve enjoyed a week’s party-fest in a quaint Maine cottage. But the cottage has been sold and this year will be the last hurrah. Determined not to put a dampener on proceedings, Harriet and Wyn agree to fake it, pretending togetherness while inwardly seething. Uncoupled they may be, but their hearts and bodies say otherwise, so when they’re allocated the honeymoon suite, complete with double shower, the game becomes a test of nerves and hormones.
The style is clever and contemporary, the characters witty, pretty and engaging and the setting enviably gorgeous. But it’s not all froth. Henry probes psyches as well as libidos, showing how the woes of the lovelorn are often provoked by cuts and thrusts first sustained in the crucible of childhood. Emily Henry shows us that mastering love depends as much on conquering fear, anxiety and self-doubt, as it does on being clever, beautiful and witty.
Happy endings are non-negotiable in Henry novels, but predictability doesn’t dampen the sizzle.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read, as well as the forthcoming Happy Place. She lives and writes in Cincinnati and the part of Kentucky just beneath it.
Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.
0 Comments