Review: Emily Henry’s latest novel delivers the kind of satisfying love story her readers have come to expect
,” Henry covers new territory. It is, in many ways, the least “happy” of her works, less swooning and more longing, with a sense of melancholy permeating throughout. The story follows a week in the life of three friends — Harriet, Sabrina and Cleo — who, on meeting in college, became their own cozy, chosen family. With their three partners in tow, the gang descends on Sabrina’s father’s summer home in Maine.
Most of Henry’s books focus on two characters, but this ensemble piece presents female friendship in all its warmth and woundedness, blessedly absent of misogynist tropes of jealousy and pettiness. Admittedly, Sabrina, Cleo and their counterparts don’t come through as sharply as the two leads, their motives mostly a mystery until the final chapters.
The core of the novel is, without question, the ballad of Harriet and her ex-fiancé, Wyn. The novel is structured in flashbacks that detail their initial attraction, their mutual devotion and the sudden, shattering breakup that devastates them both. Because they don’t want to ruin the festive reunion atmosphere, the former golden couple agrees to fake it, just for the few days they are all together.
Henry’s work shines among her best-selling romance compatriots, a group that includes Helen Hoang, Colleen Hoover, Beth O’Leary and Ali Hazelwood. They all blur the lines between women’s and literary-leaning commercial fiction, departing from the fantasy spaces of bodice rippers and misty moors to depict a world that looks a lot more like, well, our own.
from a standard love story is how much it’s a love-in-the-time-of-covid story, though inexplicably, neither covid nor the pandemic is referenced explicitly. The protagonist, Harriet, is a burned-out medical professional considering a career change. Meanwhile, Sabrina and Cleo, in the book’s B-plot, suffer the pangs of estrangement — one hesitates to schedule a visit, the other feels stressed and isolated and less intimate than before.
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