Happy Place by Emily Henry
The #1 New York Times bestseller Emily Henry’s latest novel, Happy Place (Penguin Random House), redefines the romance genre, turning comfortable cliches on their heads for the ideal summer read. Henry embraces love at every angle and gets to the heart of home and where — or with whom — it resides. Over the course of both years and only a matter of days, Henry threads pieces of then and now to create her most compelling story yet. Perhaps Yeats was right to say that the center cannot hold, but Emily Henry suggests that perhaps it can come back together.
Fake-Dating Trope With a Twist
Harriet, a miserable surgical resident whose love life imploded only a few months before, is ready to find refuge in her happy place: her friend Sabrina’s family cottage in Knott’s Harbor, Maine, alongside her closest friends for their traditional yearly trip. While she has been harboring a huge secret from her dearest friends — that her long engagement with her ex-fiancé Wyn has broken off — she yearns to fall back into a routine that fills her up after being drained so long.
Instead, she quickly finds herself in her personal hell once it’s revealed that Wyn has joined the trip last minute at Sabrina’s demand. Even worse? This is the last trip to the cottage because Sabrina’s father is selling it. Harriet’s happy place has officially gone up in smoke, but she can’t ruin her last opportunity to enjoy it by letting anyone know.
Confronted with spilling the beans and ruining the trip or pretending everything is normal for the duration of the trip, Wyn and Harriet agree that they can endure the trip, pretending everything is still the same between them. The only problem? It quickly becomes clear that neither of them ever stopped loving one another. The lines between what is pretend and real rapidly blurs, leaving both unsure of what to do.
A Profound Love Story with Emotional Depth
Henry presents classic and beloved romance novel tropes like the single bed and fake dating but brings new life to them. She keeps with what she has clearly mastered, maintaining a slow burn like her other novels, but Happy Place brings forward unexpected depth that makes this work feel more profound.
Part of the depth she builds comes from the temporal transitions she uses, marked by Happy Place and Real Life. In the Happy Place excerpts, Henry reveals how Harriet and Wyn’s love story developed and then parallels it with Real Life when things have fallen apart, and both have to pretend they haven’t. As more of Wyn and Harriet’s love story is told, it’s baffling to see how it ever fell apart.
Henry also challenges the idea of “right person, wrong time” as Harriet tries to unravel the real reason behind the falling out. Was it truly the messiness of life that got in the way or was it insecurity and miscommunication that unraveled Harriet and Wyn? Henry gets to the heart of what happens when two people try to do their best for one another, but neither asks what the other truly needs. She laces in the reality of grief, mental health, and the difficulty of trying to support someone who may not know themselves what kind of help they truly need.
Heart, Home and Happy Endings
Beyond the romantic leads in this story, the true story lies in the idea of home. While Emily Henry is well-known for her ability to write excellent romance, the best part of this novel is how it explores longtime friendship and how intricate platonic relationships can be. Each character and each relationship she presents in the book is deeply complex and multifaceted, grounding the story and increasing its relatability.
While the setting of this book is idyllic, the relationships aren’t. They are raw and occasionally confrontational across both romantic and platonic lines. The common idealism is the romance genre is largely stripped out of Happy Place, skating the line between romance and realistic fiction. That being said, it still resonates as a cozy read, with more tragedy than her prior works, but still with the Happily Ever After romance guarantees.
Emily Henry’s fan base (which I include myself in) will grab this book simply because she wrote it, and her track record speaks for itself. However, I recommend this novel to those who don’t often engage with the romance genre but enjoy character-driven stories. With how well she fleshes out every character, any reader of realistic fiction could easily identify with one of the characters and find the story and how they fit into it compelling. Happy Place is a step in a new direction for Henry, but not an unwelcome one. If anything, it gives her the chance to ensnare a wider audience.
Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read. She studied creative writing at Hope College, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @emilyhenrywrites.
