Book Lovers

Genre: Chick-Lit / Romance / Contemporary

Book Type: Audio

Author: Emily Henry

Narrator: Julia Whelan

Pages / Length: 384 pages / 11 hours and 23 minutes

Publisher: Berkley (May 3, 2022) / Penguin Audio

Book Description:

One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming...

Nora Stephens' life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

Thoughts:

I had high expectations going into this book, and let me tell you, it did NOT disappoint! everything about this book was pure magic. I absolutely loved the relationship between Nora and Charlie, and the way they discussed books was absolute icing on the cake. Definitely recommend this one, and wish I wasn’t so late to the game in reading it. it’s the perfect little RomCom, feel good, beach read book.

Favorite Quotes:

*** Some quotes towards the end contain spoilers. ***

📚 The only two ways I've ever managed to get out of my head are through reading and rigorous exercise. With either, I can slip out of my mind and drift in this bodiless dark. (Page 59)

📚 "I'm always a fan of the truth," he says.

"No one's always a fan of the truth," I say. "Sometimes the truth sucks."

"It's always better to have the truth up front than to be misled."

"There's still something to be said for social niceties." (Page 87)

📚 I watched my friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning. (Pages 111-112)

📚 "I have an intense nighttime skin care routine. I don't like to miss it, and it doesn't all fit in a handbag.” My mom used to say, You can't control the passage of time, but you can soften its blow to your face. (Page 145)

📚 Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world.

It's a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating. (Page 171)

📚 That's why I put my career first. Not because I have no life, but because I can't bear to let the one Mom wanted for us slip away […] because I want to carve out a piece of the city and its magic, just for us. But carving turns you into a knife. Cold, hard, sharp, at least on the outside.

Inside, my chest feels bruised, tender.

It's one thing to accept that the person I love most is fundamentally unknowable to me; it's another to accept that she doesn't quite see me either. (Page 226)

📚 We really are two opposing magnets, incapable of being in the same room without drawing together […] And he's looking at me like I could, like there's an ache in him only I could soothe.

I want to tell him, You are someone who looks for a reason for every thing.

Or, You are the person who pulls things apart and figures out how they work instead of simply accepting them. You're someone who would rather have the truth than a convenient lie. (Page 233)

📚 Mom and Libby liked the love stories where everything turned out perfectly, wrapped in a bow, and I've always wondered why I gravitate toward something else.

I used to think it was because people like me don't get those endings. And asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you've never even had.

The ones that speak to me are those whose final pages admit there is no going back. That every good thing must end. That every bad thing does too, that everything does.

That is what I'm looking for every time I flip to the back of a book, compulsively checking for proof that in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. That there is always hope, no matter what.

After losing Mom, those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you'll find something too. (Page 296)

📚 Because nothing - not the beautiful and not the terrible - lasts. (Page 327)

📚 Maybe it's possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places. (Page 339)

📚 This, I think, is what it is to dream, and I finally understand why Mom could never give it up, why my authors can't give it up, and I'm happy for them, because this wanting, it feels good, like a bruise you need to press on, a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them. (Page 344)

📚 She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations.

She doesn't know. You never can.

She turns the page anyway. (Page 373)

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️