“People We Meet On Vacation is the perfect romcom to fill the Summer I Turned Pretty-shaped hole in your life”

To say I’m a fan of the romance genre is quite the understatement. When Harry Met Sally is my all-time favourite film. Last year, I read 49 books, and 80% of them involved some kind of slow burn, will-they-won’t-they storyline. Over the summer, I dutifully tuned in for every weekly episode drop of The Summer I Turned Pretty to dissect Belly, Conrad and Jeremiah’s rollercoaster love triangle. 

So I like to think that I know my stuff when it comes to romantic tales that simultaneously make your heart soar and beat out of your chest with anticipation. And trust me, Emily Henry is a master. The plots of her bestselling romance novels are about as ordinary as it gets. In fact, they sound like the kind of real-life gossip you’d hear from a friend of a friend and later share with someone else over a bottle of wine – and that is very much the point. 

Any admirer of hers will tell you that she’s perfected the art of love stories that feel real but still give you butterflies. Readers praise her masterful plot lines, interesting, intelligent heroines and commend her for writing about the kinds of sensitive yet sexy men they wish they were dating IRL. 

So it should come as no surprise that People We Meet On Vacation, the first Netflix adaptation of one of her books (many others are currently in the works), hits the mark in the same way.

To those unfamiliar with the story, it follows Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth), two unlikely best friends who have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car-share home from college many years ago, they’ve been each other’s number one.  For most of the year, they live far apart – she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown – but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything, and they haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together to lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. Now she has a week to fix everything, as long as she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their relationship. 

What’s so special about them is how flawed they are: they argue, they give off mixed signals, they have regrets and do regrettable things. But who wants love interests who are perfect? Not us. Instead, we want them to be willing to grow with us and be loving and respectful and interested and interesting – but ultimately human – which is exactly what Poppy and Alex are.

The sweet, tropey moments in the film – pining for one another at siblings’ weddings, an awkward trip with their respective partners, that balcony scene – aren’t downplayed or ridiculed, but given space to breathe. Henry is a writer who takes her genre seriously and gives it the respect it deserves, which shines through in this adaptation, on which she also served as executive producer. Because, whether it’s One Day, When Harry Met Sally or Love, Rosie, the childhood friends-to-lovers formula is one that just works. 

Just as Jenny Han did with The Summer I Turned Pretty, People We Meet On Vacation leaves you with a warm, hazy afterglow and yearning for summer. Trust me when I say that if your watchlist currently has a TSITP-shaped hole in it, this might just be the next best thing to fill it.

People We Meet On Vacation is streaming on Netflix now.

Images: Netflix