Emily Henry’s Latest Contemporary Romance Will Transport You to Your Happy Place
We’re far enough into this ongoing pandemic that it’s fascinating to see potential micro-trends popping up in fiction (aside from the clear delineation between those authors that did and did not set their novels in our covid timeline). One that stands out this year is group getaways in contemporary romances: Laura Kay’s Wild Things sees a group of friends buying a house in the English countryside—the lockdown dream—while Emily Henry’s latest reunites college buddies at the eponymous Happy Place in coastal Maine. But the requisite twist is that one of the couples, surgical resident Harriet Kilpatrick and carpenter Wyn Connor, have secretly broken off their engagement months ago without clueing in the most important people in their lives. And with their beloved cottage getting sold off, making this the final summer, they don’t want to burden the others with their breakup. So they’ll have to fake-date (fake-engage?) for a week with no one the wiser… what one might consider the lockdown nightmare.
It’s such a delicious premise for the fourth book from Henry, recently profiled in Vulture as having cracked the modern romance novel formula with her willingness to explore the darker anxieties that weigh down our need for love and connection. What’s especially interesting here is watching Henry fine-tune her own particular recipe for romance, tweaking similar elements from past books and recombining them into innovative new narratives. As I noted in last year’s review of Book Lovers, all of her novels are set over the summer, yet each utilizes the sunshine and breaks and vacations differently. Happy Place has the most in common with People We Meet on Vacation: a story that spans a decade, a summer getaway as the antidote to real-world stresses and disappointments, a way to check in on the same people and see if they still mean the same things to each other as more and more responsibilities and distractions crowd into the relationships they established when they were younger and more carefree.
Because for all the time that Happy Place spends in the present, it spends an equal amount of time apart from it—in the past and in other happy places, starting with when Harry met her roommates-turned-soulmates Sabrina and Cleo in freshman year of college. As various members of the original trio depart for semesters abroad or internships, they invite in a revolving door of roommates who happen to become Sabrina and Harry’s eventual partners: suave Parth, and his flirty bud Wyn. Rounding out the group is Cleo’s girlfriend Kimmy, the kind of bubbly person who fits into the dynamic so well that it’s hard to believe she was never there from the start. And as graduation—and grad school, and med school, and dropping out of school—steers each of the six into new orbits, what keeps bringing them back together is their summers at Sabrina’s family’s mansion-sized cottage in (fictional but affectionately detailed) Knott’s Harbor, Maine.
The book also wisely visits the unhappy places, the houses that never became homes, and the dark spirals into which we descend so deep that we can’t fathom finding our way back up. Supposed relationship milestones, like meeting the parents, instead reveal how happiness can be bound up in self-sacrifice, with love and partnership and commitment becoming a zero-sum game. Henry provides a multifaceted examination of this dilemma, through the lenses of lovers and spouses and parents and best friends.
But even this final summer, the portions demarcated as Real Life, is split into parallel experiences: Harry and Wyn trying to pull one over on their closest friends, and in the process stoking their own sexual tension; contrasted with Harry’s relatable confusion at not understanding why Wyn broke her heart months ago and what he wants from her now.