Rating: 99% | A+ | ★★★★★ Warnings: + Sexual content Synopsis (from Goodreads): 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. Spoiler-Free Section I haven't stopped thinking about Beach Read since I finished it almost two weeks ago. I've read five books since then, but this is the one that's stayed in my mind. Beach Read rehabilitated the contemporary romance genre for me. I've read some popular contemporary romances that I didn't enjoy (The Hating Game and The Kiss Equation come to mind) and I was fully expecting to be disappointed by Beach Read too. But this book surpassed all of my expectations and more. It's hilarious and smart and sincere and angsty and oh-so-perfect. Beach Read seems to set itself up for failure by employing all of the typical tropes: the small town with wacky inhabitants, the rivals-to-lovers romance, and the writer with incurable writer's block searching for new inspiration. And Henry doesn't reject or subvert these tropes; in fact, she goes all in—and that's what makes Beach Read so endlessly endearing. (Click "Read More" for spoilers.) Plot (29/30) Beginning (9/10), Middle (10/10), End (10/10) Beach Read's perfect plot score is marred only by its slow, somewhat complicated start. Henry starts in media res and the reader must quickly become familiar with January's father's cheating, January's mother's cancer, Sonya, January's breakup, and January's sudden move to North Bear Shores. It's quite a bit to take in, but Henry makes up for it by carrying the reader through the rest of the novel at a slower, more organic pace. January's acclimation to the town—as well as the growth of her relationship with Gus—is absolutely perfect. No event seems out of place or contrived; each event happens because the characters move on and have minds of their own. The middle of a novel sometimes tends to fade into obscurity in the reader's mind once it's past, overshadowed by the drama of the beginning and the end. Beach Read's strength, however, comes precisely from the power of its middle third. That being said, the ending is absolutely perfect as well. Having now also read Henry's other recent contemporary romance (People We Meet on Vacation, review forthcoming), I'm aware of her talent for making everything collapse around her characters right before the resolution of the conflict. January's world crumbles around her: Gus's ex-wife comes back, her father's ex-mistress shows up at her front door, and she still hasn't finished her novel. And the reader is right alongside her, gasping and worrying for her all the way. I love January and Gus's relationship, but the real star of the ending is January's father's letters. The reader can feel the raw emotion of his words, the effort that he puts into trying to be a good father even when he knows he's betrayed her: I'm your father, the man you made from nothing but your tiny fingers and toes. Characters (30/30) Development (15/15) and Lure (15/15) January and Gus are wonderfully developed characters that balance each other out well. They are witty and so real, with real insecurities. The best romances emerge from parallel, collective growth, and the sincerity of January and Gus's relationship stems from the way they mutually help each other heal. As Gus says, 'I've never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.' Writing (20/20) Descriptions (10/10) and Flow (10/10) I have myriad highlights for Beach Read because it's so full of quotes that I love. Even the simplest things, from descriptions of light leaping to jokes about margaritas, are crafted to incite only the strongest emotions from readers. And, of course, the best quotes are the ones where the characters allow themselves to feel both the best and the worst emotions. Sonya's quotes from her final confrontation with January hit me particularly hard. There's so much pain and desperation in her words—a desperate need to make January understand her situation. And, of course, the dramatic ironic parallel of the return of Gus's ex-wife makes it all the more tragic: 'He'd talk about bringing you up, about moving the boat up here and spending all summer on it, the three of us. I thought, I'm going to live there until I die, with a man who loves me.' Closure/Set-Up (20/20)
Logic (10/10) and Set-Up/Closure (10/10) The ending of Beach Read cements it forever in contemporary romance perfection. Henry tears everything apart before seamlessly mending it all back together, better than before without seeming saccharine. There's a beautiful circular quality to the ending, exemplified in the parallels that Gus brings up: January tells Gus that Jacques was never truly "her favorite person" and at the end, Gus tells January that she is his "favorite person"; January tells Gus that she never felt overwhelmed watching Jacques sleeps and at the end, Gus tells January that he feels overwhelmed watching her sleep. Henry stresses that Beach Read is about "happy-for-nows," that people don't have to wander deserts in search of an elusive, perhaps fantastical "forever." Living in the moment is enough—live in enough moments, and perhaps it'll mosaic into forever.
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