There is also an adorable and very quarantine-friendly form of communication between the leads if you’re looking for a new way to bond with your neighbors!” -EH (I think fans of Amy Reichert would love this, and vice versa.) Reading Star-Crossed will have you feeling like you’re strolling down a sunlit street, stopping to smell the flowers. Star-Crossed by Minnie Darke “This delightful pseudo-romance is a charming tale of two people caught within one another’s orbit since childhood, though struggling to find their way to one another. Joy is a worthy venture.”įrom Josie Silver to Talia Hibbert, explore Emily Henry’s all-time favorite romance reads below. And in so doing, you choose to believe that, no matter the state of the world, love is a worthy venture. You set aside your cynicism and self-judgment to watch people do one of the most miraculous, strange, embarrassing, intoxicating, and terrifyingly vulnerable things: You watch them fall in love. But when you pick up a romance novel, there’s an implicit agreement to hope.

“Romance is as wide-reaching a genre as any other, and the characters likewise fall across a spectrum. On the inherent optimism that attracts her to love stories, she says: A world where Happily Ever Afters are a promise and love really can conquer all.” It was only after picking up Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game that she found herself “wholly transported to a world much like our own, only a little bit shinier, safer, sillier. Reading had always been my favorite escape, but nothing I picked up seemed to distract me from real-world stressors, and some of my tried-and-true favorite genres only seemed to amplify my worries.” “I started reading rom-coms at a time when the world felt particularly dark and volatile. Known for her thoughtful examinations of love and family, Henry extolled on her passion for the genre in a book list for Goodreads: Her latest work, Happy Place, comes out next year. The book spent twelve weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list, and her follow-up romance novels – 2021’s People We Meet on Vacation and 2022’s Book Lovers – garnered significant BookTok buzz. After penning a string of young adult novels, Emily Henry published her rom-com debut, Beach Read, to widespread acclaim in 2020.

Books like beach read by emily henry