This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Nora Stephens knows all the tropes from romance novels. She should: she’s a literary agent, and a darn good one. She works nonstop for her writers. She’s a New York City girl through and through, having been raised there, and she’s still very happy with the pace of city life and all that New York offers.
To her dismay, Nora has found that she tends to be on the wrong end of a trope in real life: her boyfriends leave the city (supposedly only for a weekend or a couple of weeks), discover small-town life and its many charms, and find adorable new girlfriends who either run bakeries or Christmas tree farms (that need saving). She plays the part of ice-queen city girlfriend who gets dumped (and probably doesn’t care anyway).
Her little sister, Libby, loves a very popular book by an author Nora represents. It’s set in a charming small town in North Carolina, and Libby persuades Nora to take a break from the city and spend a month in Sunshine Falls. Libby is pregnant with her third child and needs a girls’ trip, and Nora can never say no to her.
Thus, Nora finds herself stuck in a boring small town with bad Wi-Fi during the slow publishing month of August. Libby hopes Nora will meet a handsome local man and be swept off her feet. But the man Nora keeps running into, oddly enough, is Charlie Lastra, an annoying (though excellent) book editor she knows from New York. Sure, they seem to have a lot in common, as she keeps finding out, but if she’s “the archetypical City Person, he is the Dour, Unappeasable Stick-in-the-Mud. He’s the Growly Misanthrope, Oscar the Grouch, second-act Heathcliff, the worst parts of Mr. Knightley.”
And they are both in town for all of August. Eventually, Nora and Charlie start spending time together, and they learn new things about each other and themselves. Their interactions may even allow them to break out of the boxes they’ve been put in — or put themselves in. These two people who can truly be more than stereotypical characters discover depth and purpose. But it’s possible their story can’t be a happily-ever-after; responsibilities call, and they are nothing but responsible.
I always enjoy Emily Henry’s books. Book Lovers didn’t let me down. It’s a likable story about two people who supposedly aren’t likable. It openly pokes fun at tropes and then digs down deep beneath them and allows the characters to grow past them. I just wish these adult books of Henry’s weren’t so “adult” with the sex scenes and profanity. (I do so love her YA books, like The Love That Split the World.)
RATING
Rated: High. Profanity includes 50 uses of strong profanity, around 60 instances of moderate profanity, about 15 uses of mild language, and about 25 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content is high, with one four-page-long, detailed sex scene and a few others that are shorter.
