Some fiancés get cold feet before the wedding. Others decide to hook up with their lifelong best friend.
This was my first Emily Henry book and I adored it.
I had seen one of her previous books, Book Lovers, around a couple years ago, and while it seems like the kind of thing that would be right up my alley (hello! I have a whole blog devoted to the books I read! Including romance novels!) it never made it to the top of my TBR. Now that I’ve read this book, I’ll have to bump Book Lovers up my TBR list, along with other Emily Henry books.
I listened to this one on audio, which is narrated by Julia Whelan. She’s one of my favorite audiobook narrators, and I hadn’t heard her in a while, so I was thrilled when I started playing this and heard her voice again!
This book starts with the main character, Daphne, talking about how her ex-fiancé always loves to tell the story of how they met because it’s a perfect meet-cute.
Then we find out that her ex, Peter, had a heart-to-heart with his best friend, Petra, the night of his bachelor party and they decided to get together.
Since Peter owned the house he and Daphne were living in, she had nowhere to live.
So she ended up moving in with Miles, who had been Petra’s boyfriend up until the night of Peter’s bachelor party.
There are some flashbacks that cover Peter and Daphne’s relationship and breakup, but the “present day” of the book starts right before Daphne and Miles receive invitations to Peter and Petra’s wedding. They both decide they should go, knowing Peter and Petra only invited them so they could feel like they were being the bigger people, so fuck them and their high horses.
Sure enough, when Peter sees Daphne’s RSVP, he calls her to tell her she “shouldn’t feel like she has to” because “he doesn’t want her to be alone” at the wedding.
Which, of course, means he doesn’t really want her at the wedding, but felt like he had to invite her.
She responds she won’t be alone because she’ll be with her new boyfriend, Miles. Peter doubts they’ll still be a couple at that point, which of course is infuriating, but he has a point because they’re not even dating.
Daphne confesses her impulsive lie to Miles, who decides they should go along with it. So he takes a selfie of the two of them looking like a happy couple so she can post it to her socials, and you can pretty much guess what happens from there. Every time they find themselves near Peter and/or Petra, they act like a couple, and it doesn’t take long for “pretending to have feelings for each other” turns into “having real feelings for each other.”
Daphne especially needs to bond with Miles because she had moved to this small town in Michigan to be with Peter and let herself become completely absorbed into Peter’s circle of friends and hadn’t bothered to develop any friendships outside their circle. Of course they all took Peter’s side in the breakup, leaving her all alone in Peter’s home town.
So, when one of her coworkers mentions wanting to go out because her ex has their son for the night, and Daphne doesn’t have anything on her calendar, she offers to go out with her. They don’t instantly become best friends, but their friendship does grow over the course of the book and I loved seeing it.
Because Daphne is in her ex’s home town, she had been planning to leave after the library’s big fundraiser event at the end of the summer. She even manages to find another job as the summer wraps up, but of course you know she’s staying in town to be with Miles and her newfound group of friends.
Speaking of friends, I found one of the most poignant parts of the novel to be Daphne coming to terms with the loss of her best friend. They had been best friends before Peter arrived on the scene, but when Daphne’s best friend started dating someone, they became a quartet, and apparently they also chose Peter over Daphne.
That kind of betrayal is especially painful, and harder to reckon with than the loss of the friends you were only friends with because they were your partner’s friends. I was so willing to throw that former best friend to the curb after what she did to Daphne.
But Daphne does reconnect with her best friend before the end of the novel, who explains that, because her partner (now fiancé) was friends with Peter and wanted to keep being friends with Peter, she felt like she had to choose between her best friend and the love of her life, and, OK, yeah, that’s a tough spot to be in. Daphne understands that too, and while they don’t immediately pick up where they left off in their friendship, they do start to repair the damage that was done by the rift.
I wouldn’t call this a “book with a message,” but it does seem to send a pretty clear message that women should not let themselves be completely absorbed by their partner. Daphne has to move out of her home on very little notice because her name isn’t on the deed. She has no friends because she didn’t bother to develop and nurture any friendships outside of Peter’s circle of friends. And she does take ownership of that and rectifies it.
The book has an epilogue that takes place about a year after the main events of the book end. Of course, Daphne and Miles are still together, and while they’re not married or engaged, they are moving in together. It ends with someone asking how they met, and Daphne tells the reader that Miles looks to her because he knows how much she loves to tell it.
It was a call-back to the beginning of the novel, but also a reversal of the beginning of the novel. Because instead of Peter controlling the narrative, Daphne’s new-and-improved boyfriend yields the floor to her, proving his superiority as her partner.
I loved everything about this book. I loved all the characters, including the side characters. I love that Daphne goes from being with a guy largely because he has the stable family she always wanted, but never had, to being with a guy who has intentionally separated himself from his parents because of the harm they’ve done, but that doesn’t stop him from being vulnerable or emotionally available to Daphne.
And, of course, Peter and Petra break up and Peter comes crawling back to Daphne. You can guess how that went over for him.
I also happen to love that this story takes place in Michigan, with more than a few scenes happening on, in, or near Lake Michigan. I happened to be on vacation in Northern Wisconsin while listening to this audiobook, so I was also enjoying Lake Michigan at the same time I was listening to these characters fall in love near Lake Michigan. Highly recommend.