🌜Moon Child🌛

During the summer. Two adversaries. They didn’t see that coming….

Nora Stephens’ life revolves on books – she’s read them all – and she’s not your typical heroine. Not the courageous one, the laid-back ideal girl, or the darling. In truth, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she secures lucrative agreements as a ruthless literary agent, and for her adored little sister Libby.

Which is why, when Libby asks her for a sisters’ trip away, she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August, with illusions of a small-town metamorphosis for Nora, who she’s persuaded has to become the heroine in her own story.

Instead of picnics in the countryside or encounters with a lovely country doctor or a bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps running across Charlie Lastra, a bookish moody editor from the city. It would be a meet-cute if they hadn’t met so many times before and it had never been cute.

If Nora is aware that she isn’t an ideal heroine, Charlie is aware that he isn’t anyone’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again – in a series of coincidences that no editor worth their salt would allow – what they discover may just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

My Thoughts…

I certainly have an unpopular viewpoint on Book Lovers. This was my first book by Emily Henry, and I had no idea what to expect other than the fact that everyone seems to enjoy her romances.

In principle, I should have appreciated this. I enjoy books with bookish people, the rivals-to-lovers narrative, and small-town settings. Unfortunately, despite enjoying the beginning, most of this did not work for me.

First and foremost, I would not call this novel rivals-to-lovers, and I believe that beginning the blurb with the sentence “One summer. “Two rivals.” creates unrealistic expectations. In the prologue, Nora and Charlie share one unpleasant dinner and that is the extent of their feud. We’re told they’re rivals, but there’s little evidence to back this up. I wish we had spent more time in New York at the start, depicting the evolution of their hatred. Unfortunately, that does not happen, and we soon find ourselves in this small village where they stumble into one other, and it feels more like insta-love to me. I will add that I appreciated the early email banter, but I wish we had more of it! This book was nearly 400 pages long, and I felt like more time should have been spent on creating the relationship dynamic rather than extraneous tales that we didn’t need.

While reading Book Lovers, I had an epiphany. I realized that I much prefer dual-point-of-view romances. We spent the entire novel in Nora’s head, which was at times tiring. It would have been interesting to hear Charlie’s side of the story and have a better understanding of him. I don’t despise the misunderstanding cliche as much as I know many other readers do since I know miscommunications occur frequently in real life, particularly in new relationships. I simply wish we had known where Charlie was coming from from the start.

I typically enjoy novels about sisterhood, but I struggled to care about Nora’s relationship with Libby. What a case of misunderstanding! Their tale was very much in the forefront of this book, and I believe it detracted from the actual romance. I enjoy the discussions about grieving, but I believe they should have been expanded upon or left out entirely. This, I believe, was true for many of the introduced narratives. Things were brought up to add intrigue or tension, but they weren’t carried through, therefore they weren’t intriguing to me!

This may appear to be a rant, but there were several things I genuinely loved. I enjoyed learning about Nora and Charlie’s careers and seeing how they collaborated on a book. I enjoyed their conversation and the sexual parts that we did see. I loved both the prologue and the epilogue; it was everything in between that bothered me. I thought it was fast-paced, and the audiobook was voiced by Julia Whelan, whom I enjoy.

More might be said, but I don’t want to give anything away! I’m not convinced this was the ideal place to begin with Emily Henry. Several friends have told me that they like Beach Read, so I’m willing to give it a shot!

Rating..

Characters– 5 
Atmosphere– 7 
Writing– 7 
Plot– 4 
Intrigue– 4 
Logic– 6 
Enjoyment– 5