I know some serious literary writers and readers don’t take Emily Henry very seriously since she’s a romance writer, but on a technical level, her writing is damn good. Here’s a few examples.
She uses metaphors well. This one is simple, but very fitting for the character’s personality—“Alex’s shoulders life, like he’s a turtle retracting into his shell.”
Other times, we get short but deep character observations that could totally be in a literary novel. “I should’ve guessed what a cautious driver he’d be. Then again, sometimes when you guess about people, you end up very wrong.”
There are also so many brilliant bits of humor in this book that Henry uses. There’s a running joke between the two main characters about the terrible, old Honda Aspire they borrow, about how it aspires to have working air conditioning, aspires to live long enough to see the end of human suffering, though it probably won’t live long enough to see the of the Star Wars franchise. Henry’s funny characters are actually funny to read about and it makes the novel a very fun journey.
I also think Henry is very smart about how she involves side characters in her books. She knows her audience and she doesn’t waste too much time on supporting characters, so she comes up with clever ways to have minor characters that need to exist for plot logic to add to the tension of the story. For example, the two other people they’re sharing an Uber with are honeymooners in bedazzled visors that say WIFEY and HUBBY who are “so tanned already they look something like Alex’s shoes.” It’s simple, but so effective. A silly detail like the cringey visors tells us exactly who these two strangers are and what kind of people they are in a comical way.
It’s a romcom with romcom hijinks, but Henry really does a beautiful job of exploring Millennial ennui and the emotional complexities of travel, with all its highs and lows. She also digs into career satisfaction in a very interesting and wise way.
Spark notes; I have a soft spot for romcoms and Emily Henry is the real deal with her craft.
