#CBR13 Book 41: "People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry

Page count: 382 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR13 Bingo: Travel

Official book description:

Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?

In this contemporary romance, we meet Poppy and Alex, who despite their different interests and priorities in life ended up best friends after a bit of a false start in college. No matter what they do for the rest of their year, they meet up every summer for one week of vacation together. However, two years ago, something happened, and they have neither seen each other, nor spoken since. 

Poppy is a valued travel writer for a prestigious publication but feels restless and unhappy and she's pretty sure the last time she can remember being truly happy was on that last trip with Alex. She sends him a text message, not really expecting a reply, but is surprised and happy that he's willing to exchange some pleasantries. Alex' younger brother is getting married, and the occasion offers Poppy the opportunity to invite Alex on one last trip when she's determined that she's not only going to mend their friendship but hopefully convince him to take their relationship to the next level. 

Alex is a high school teacher back in their hometown who, due to the early death of his mother, helps his father take care of his younger brother. Over the years of his and Poppy's friendship, both Alex and Poppy have had romantic partners, Alex has mainly been in an on-and-off-again relationship with a co-worker. For the last few years, however, he's been single. 

I'm not going to lie, this review will not be as good as it should be, as I finished this book back at the end of July, and we're now in the middle of October. I had relatively high expectations for this book, considering how affected I was by her first novel for adults, Beach Read. While I read a lot of positive write-ups of this book, the fact that I now barely remember many details at all about the book (while there are still scenes from Beach Read I can recall exactly) means that I've downgraded the rating of the book with half a star and will have to try to dig up my memories of what worked (and didn't) for me.

As with Henry's first novel, this story suffers somewhat from only showing Poppy's point of view throughout. We only know explicitly what Alex feels when he comes out and explains it, which for the longest time he doesn't. Since a lot of the conflict and complications in this novel come from a lack of clear communication between and a number of silly misunderstandings relating to what one or the other believes the other one is looking for as a long-term life goal, it ends up being frustrating to only get Poppy's side of things.

I seem to recall liking the various supporting players, including several of Alex and Poppy's exes, their family members, and even Poppy's demanding boss. There is no villain keeping the lovers apart here, just their own lack of clear communication. While this one didn't stay with me in the same way as Beach Read did, I will absolutely give Henry's next romance a chance when that comes out. 

Judging a book by its cover: Another bright and animated cover, this nevertheless doesn't really seem to capture the sort of journeys that Poppy and Alex like to go on. As with Ms. Henry's previous novel, the cover does not do the contents of her book justice. This suggests a different kind of book than what you're actually getting. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

 

#CBR11 Book 62: "Ride with Me" by Ruthie Knox

Page count: 328 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR11 Bingo: Travel

Tom is a brooding loner with a past, who gave up the corporate life and now works as a bike mechanic. He's estranged from most of his family, with the exception of his sister. Determined to cycle the Trans-America trail, from Oregon to Virginia, he's annoyed when he discovers said sister has been e-mailing someone (as him) to arrange for a riding partner. When he finds out that the "Alex" his sister has been e-mailing is, in fact, a Lexie, he is even more frustrated. He doesn't want company, but he also feels bad about leaving Lexie without any sort of protection on the journey. They agree to cycle together until Tom can find someone else for Lexie to ride safely with.

Lexie's parents met on the Trans-Am trail during the seventies, and she and her brother had always planned on doing the ride together. Then her brother went and married a woman with no interest in cycling, and Lexie has to decide whether she wants to do the ride by herself. Since no one answers her initial ad for a companion when it's obvious that she's a woman, she places a new one that seems more ambiguous. She figures that once all the details are ironed out, whomever agreed to ride with her could be persuaded to go along with the plan. She's not really expecting to meet a really hot, but taciturn and angry guy, with what seems to be very sexist views of female cyclists. Because he seems to take it as read that she'll be attracted to him, Lexie makes up a fictional husband to make sure the arrogant man is put in his place.

While both are incredibly annoyed by the other, they eventually grow to like one another and become friends over the course of their journey. Tom manages to get Lexie to relax more and rely a lot less on fixed plans, maps and her bike computer. Lexie gets Tom to open up more and gradually begin to interact with the people around him. Of course, the more time they spend together, the more the attraction between them grows, as well, and that fictional husband of Lexie's becomes quite the obstacle. Tom was cheated on by his now ex-wife and is determined never to be a part of any form of adultery. Having cycled thousands of miles together perpetuating the lie, Lexie is worried about how Tom will actually react if she tells him the truth.

As far as I can recall, this is the first romance novel I've ever read focused on cycling. It's a road trip romance, but the mode of transportation is bicycles, rather than a car, and these people are pretty serious about their hobby. On the other hand, as cycling cross country is a time consuming process, there is really not a smidge of the insta-love here. Tom and Lexie's journey takes many months and they have a lot of time to initially annoy each other, before the sparks fly, the truth comes out and they begin to get on (and get it on) passionately. During the first half of the book, the conflict is Tom and Lexie's differing views of how the journey should be conducted and them being seeming opposites. Once they start steaming up the tent every night (not to mention apparently having as much amorous time al fresco as possible), they are both in agreement that neither is looking for long term commitment, and their affair will end as soon as they reach Virginia. They seem to have very different plans for the future, and initially it seems impossible that they could continue a relationship after completing their long journey.

I've read a fair few Ruthie Knox novels in previous years, but she's not as prolific as a lot of other contemporary writers out there, and so I have a tendency to forget about her, only to rediscover her again every so often. Each time I pick up one of her books, I'm surprised by how witty and enjoyable it is to read, with great chemistry between the leads, clever dialogue and some really steamy smexy times. I still have a few of her older books on my TBR list, and should probably do myself the favour of reading them before I completely forget how much I tend to like her books.

Judging a book by its cover: See, it's not just hockey romances that have prominent man-titty on the cover. A book about cycling can too, even though the hero is described as wearing t-shirts for most of the scenes that aren't *insert funky bass line here*. Also, since the hero is described as having several prominent tattoos, it would have been nice to have that reflected in the cover image.

Crossposted by Cannonball Read.

CBR2 Book 88: "Eat Pray Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Page count: 384 pages
Ratin: 2 stars
Date begun: October 2nd, 2010
Date finished: October 5th, 2010

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Everywhere I turn recently, there seems to be some mention of Eat Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert has been on the Oprah show, it's been turned into a big movie with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. It's an international bestseller. One of my friends bought it to read on her very long plane ride to Peru this summer, thinking that it would be an easily disposable book - but ended up loving it, carrying it around with her on her three week trip, and took it back home with her. Having thought it was just the tale of one woman's trip round the world, I was curious, and decided I needed to read it for my blog.

I wanted to hate this book. Having seen the trailer for the movie, the whole thing seems so smug. To begin with, I really did hate the book, or at least Elizabeth Gilbert herself. She complains about being trapped in her perfect marriage with her understanding husband and their two homes in New York and I did not really see why I should be sympathetic to a person who leaves her husband to live with a younger actor, gets divorced, depressed and ends up ruining her relationship to both men. Needing to find herself and properly define herself as a person, Elizabeth Gilbert wanted to go to Italy to explore the art of pleasure, to India to explore spiritual devotion and to Bali to explore the balance between pleasure and devotion. Luckily, unlike lots of other women who suffer through gruelling divorces, her publisher paid her an advance, so she had the money to go off for a year and visit all these countries and do all these things.

She decides to spend four months in each place, and she wants to be celibate for the whole year, because sex messes things up and interferes with things. In the Eat part, she moves to Italy to learn Italian, and meets lots of nice people and eats and eats and eats and in the beginning pissed me off with her stories of how she loves travelling the world, but never uses guide books and seems proud to sort of stumble through things unprepared. She goes to a language school and does indeed learn quite a lot of Italian in four months, and manages to stop using anti-depressants because she has conversations with herself in a notebook.

Then, for the Pray part, she goes to India and lives in an Ashram and tries to find closeness with God. At first, she has trouble meditating and hates chanting and is unable to get into the whole spiritual release thing. She meets some straight talking man from Texas who refuses to listen to her self-pitying bullshit, and she eats vegetarian food and scrubs temple floors and in the end, obviously masters all the things she came there to do, and hugs trees and feels at one with the universe just in time for her to leave for Bali.

In Bali, she goes to find an old medicine man she met there years before. He read her palm and said she should come live with him, and he would teach her everything he knows. When she returns, he doesn't recognize her, because she's all happy now. He teaches her more meditation techniques and she sees how he heals people, and also befriends a lovely Balinese divorcee doctor, who has to move from place to place and struggles to take care of her precocious daughter and two adopted orphans. The lady becomes Liz' new best friend, and she manages to get all her friends and acquaintances to donate enough money that she can buy a house for the lovely doctor, and her endearing kids. She also breaks her vow of celibacy when she meets and falls in love with a Brazilian man 17 years older than her, and completes the Love part of the book.

I actually liked bits of the book a lot, but overall, this is the story of a smug middle class American woman who got to travel the world for a year on someone else's dime, and because she had to spend a lot of time alone and thinking about herself and her life, got over her divorce just fine. Some of the stories told in the book are very funny, and wryly and interestingly narrated. She describes things well and I really did find myself wanting to go to Italy and Bali, although the Ashram part didn't really grab me too much. Reading about someone else's spiritual enlightenment just isn't that interesting. The travelogue bits are much better. I am not sure why this book has become so very popular, but I suspect Oprah Winfrey's recommendation has something to do with it. It's not a bad book, by all means, but it's not a very good book either.