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Read This Book: Beach Read by Emily Henry

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is the ultimate summer beach book, ironically (and I love it) titled Beach Read by Emily Henry!

January is a romance novelist, and a fairly successful one at that. But she no longer believes in love after her beloved father passed away and she found out he’d been cheating on her mom, and he left her his beach house on Lake Michigan, where he saw the other woman. This is a real problem, because January has an impending deadline but her novel isn’t coming together, and she’s out of money. So she heads to her dad’s love nest to take the summer to finish her novel and pack up the house to sell it. She gets a major shock when she arrives and discovers her next-door-neighbor is none other than Gus, her college rival and celebrated literary fiction novelist. Their re-acquaintance borders on antagonistic, but when she learns that he’s also struggling with his book, they decide to challenge each other to swap genres for the summer and see what happens.

I think for the rest of time, as soon as it is summer I will be asking people if they’ve picked up Beach Read yet–it was one of those rare books that hooked me from the first page and kept me absolutely riveted until the very end. Yes, it’s a romance novel, and I think romance novels rock, but it’s got prickly characters who’ve been deeply hurt and big discussions on love, relationships, family, and how you connect with people that should appeal to anyone, no matter what your go-to genre may be. This book is also genuinely funny–it’s set in a small, fictional Lake Michigan town and populated with hilarious characters who surprise and delight you, and January herself has a cutting sense of humor as she reckons with a version of her history that she realizes was never true. I also love the setting, but I admit that I am biased–I grew up and currently live about an hour away from Lake Michigan and yes, the beaches really are sandy, there are waves, and no, you cannot see Wisconsin from the shore, so it feels like being at the ocean but without the salt or sharks. Everything about this book felt so true and genuine to me, from the big questions about how to make relationships work to the funny details about what it’s like to be a writer. Don’t sleep on this book. You won’t be sorry you read it!

Happy reading, and if you hit the beach this summer, don’t forget your sunscreen!

Tirzah

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