Opposites Attract

Beach Read by Emily Henry

Publication Date: May 19, 2020

Summary From GoodReads:

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 neighboring 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.

“Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

Confession:

I have sort of mixed feelings about this book. As a whole I liked it, I thought it was a good story with lots of witty banter between the two characters, and I also liked the angst that January was feeling about her father’s affair, and finally how broken Gus appeared to be, but in the end there was just way too much of some things and not enough of others to make me really love this book.

I initially really liked January at the start of the book, but somewhere in the middle I started to become annoyed by her. She was very insecure about almost everything in her life, both good and bad. She was constantly reading into what she thought Gus was thinking, and she was almost always wrong about it. She also brooded way to much on her father’s affair. It was almost like he cheated on her not her mother with the amount of resentment. But it was nice to see her struggle with the issue and finally come to terms with it, sort of.

I really would have liked to see things from Gus’s point of view, I really wanted to know what was going on in his head most of the time. He had such a hard life, and it does play into his personality, but I really wanted to know what was going on in his head. I did like him for the most part, and I loved how much he loved January, even though he struggled expressing it to her at times.

The story was more enjoyable than the romance, quite honestly. I really liked the scenes of the two of them writing in their own houses, facing each other through windows and writing notes back and forth to each other. That was just so cute. I also liked the romance dates that January took Gus on as part of their bet. Gus’s research dates were a little bit harder to like, but it played into his personality perfectly. Watching them both work through their writer’s block was also interesting as was the struggles with writing something out of their comfort zones. We don’t get to see as much of Gus’s story as we do January’s but they both sounded really good.

If you are more into angsty love stories than cute rom-coms than this is a book you should consider picking up. I liked the writing style well enough that I will try another book by this author the next time I am in the mood for an angsty romance.