Beach Read by Emily Henry- An Honest Review! (And Life Update)

Hi everyone! I'm really sorry for being MIA for a long time, but I'm back!

Life Update: I have recently read a lot of books and now I'm here to provide some reviews so that you all will be able to decide your next read carefully. Also, I bought a new Kindle Oasis which I'm in love with. 

Life has surely been very tough for the past few months, for not only me but for the majority of us, and all credits go to the infamous CORONA VIRUS. Also, I hope each and every one of you have been keeping safe during these hard times. 

I have been living alone for the past few months and trying to get by. My social life seems to have hit a new low since I started working from home. But it has also given me extra time to read and do all the things I love. Its technically making lemonade out of the lemons life has given us.

Now getting back to the main topic- without further ado, here is a brief review of  "Beach Read" by Emily Henry.

Blurb:

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They're polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighbouring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She'll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he'll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

Review:

Okay. So I had heard a lot of hype about this book in the Booktube community, where it had been mentioned in book hauls of every Booktubers I follow, and it was also declared as one of their most anticipated reads. After you hear so much hype about a particular book, you definitely get curious to see what's the hype all about. And that was the case with me as well.

I had recently ordered a Kindle and I was really excited to start reading some good books in there so I ordered an eBook version of this book. I couldn't wait for my kindle to arrive so I started reading it in my Kindle app on my phone.

As soon as I started reading this book, I could see that it had a protagonist who had recently gone through a big trauma, which I found out to be very mainstream. I'm in no way condoning the book or the trauma that the character had gone through, but to be very honest I have read this in way too many books already that it neither shook me to my core nor did it have much effect on me. 

So we follow January Andrews who was a writer and whose father had just passed away, and only after her father's death did she come to know that he also had an extramarital affair with his high-school sweetheart. And also her mother was a cancer survivor. SIGH. Why does a writer give all the woes of life to its main character?

After her father's funeral, January shifts into his house (her father had been living a double life and had also bought this home) because she was broke. And there she finds, any guesses? Yes, Augustus Everett, who also apparently was in the same university as January and was her rival as well. They are both writers in this book.

The story from there goes on how every other romance/ chick-lit novel proceeds, they hate each other at first and then they become friends and then- you guessed it right, they fall in love. Basically, the whole plot also revolves around how they challenge each other to write a book based on the preferred genre of the other person. So January had to write a slow-mysterious-brooding characters book and Augustus had to write a romance novel. They then help each other through the process of writing different genres by sharing with each other about their process which helps them in writing these books, so they go on adventures.

Final Thoughts:

I found this book to be a one-time read-only, and by that what I mean is that I won't go out of my way to read it again, and it honestly isn't very memorable. If after a few months you will ask me what I thought about January, I'll be like January who? (Sorry for being brutal). You can definitely read it once but that's about it. I would also request people to not get offended in case they really liked this book. These are MY honest opinions on the book.

Ratings: 

I'll give it a solid 3 stars.

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Review by Yashvi from @the_wordaholics