Review: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

A book about family, sisterhood and writing your own story. Out May 3!

High-rise skyscrapers traded in for an off-the-map sleepy town. Boyfriend checklists and summer bucket lists. Sisters that are each other’s truest love. A bookstore that gets a facelift. A piggyback ride, a swimming hole, a childhood racecar bed. Cups of coffee and gin martinis and a book — the book — that brings together an “I’ll-figure-it-out” kind of guy and a woman who’s driven to compulsively fix things, no matter the cost.

It’s Emily Henry’s new book, Book Lovers, and you need to read it.

Let me back up for a minute. Who’s Emily Henry? Why do you need to read her books immediately? She’s relatively new to the adult fiction scene — Beach Read, came out in 2020, with People We Meet on Vacation following just a year later — but her recent books have been featured everywhere from Buzzfeed to the New York Times. My friend Taylor once referred to her as “the Nora Ephron of our time” and she’s not wrong: Henry’s writing is whip-smart and funny, and she creates imperfect, relateable characters with a lot of heart. (P.S. Writers, she’s also very generous with her writing advice, both on her website and Instagram account.)

Henry’s newest, Book Lovers, is a celebration of a lot of things: it's an ode to family and sisterhood, an exploration of what makes a home, and a love letter to New York City. Maybe best of all, it features a compelling heroine who's a notorious shark in her field. Nora Stephens is ruthless, driven, smart and knows what she wants — and instead of apologizing for who she is, she embraces it.

This is, of course, also a book about Nora and Charlie: an agent and an editor in NYC who start off on the wrong foot but run into each other enough times while they’re away from the city that it suddenly doesn't matter. They’re great together in this book. The chemistry! The banter! The emotional intelligence! The Roy Kent vibes! Nobody writes a slowburn romance like Emily Henry.

It’s the character building that really gets me, though. As a reader, I got to know who Nora was piece by piece: through flashbacks to her childhood, off-the-cuff remarks to Charlie and conversations with her sister, Libby. Slowly, I discovered Nora’s experience with grief — how it shaped her and the way she approached relationships, and how she was ultimately able to be ok in its aftermath. Book Lovers does a powerful job of showing us that you can be alone without feeling lonely. That it’s ok not to feel ok sometimes. And that you may not get everything you want, but things will work themselves out. I think we all want that: to know that everything will be ok, even with all we might have to overcome.

This book is for anyone who loves:
❤️‍🔥 Contemporary romance (FYI: Open door scenes)
📚 Adult fiction
🙁 😊 Enemies to lovers
💻 Work adversaries
🫂 Forced proximity
🗣️ Witty banter and unconventional heroines
👪 Plotlines about family dynamics, especially sisters
👑 Well-earned happily-ever-afters

Possible trigger warnings for grief, off-page death of a parent and profanity.

Book Lovers was one of my favorite reads from the past few months! It’s out next Tuesday (May 3), so there’s still time to preorder. Otherwise, you won’t have to wait too long to grab it from your local bookseller.

What have you been reading? What new releases are you excited about?