HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry

Harriet’s happy place is Sabrina’s Maine cottage where they and their good friend Cleo spend a blissful week with their significant others every year.  This year is bittersweet, as it will be their last, since Sabrina’s father is selling the cottage.  (Why doesn’t Sabrina just buy it??)  Unbeknownst to everyone else, Harriet and her fiancé, Wyn, broke up five months ago, but he is there anyway, making things awkward so that Harriet’s happy place is not so happy.  Emily Henry’s ever-sparkling dialog does not quite offset the formulaic plot this time, and Harriet and Wyn’s witty repartee does not bring them any closer to solving the dilemma that broke them up in the first place.  These two perfectly exemplify a communication breakdown.  I loved all the characters in Book Lovers, not just the leading pair, but here the other characters seem very one-dimensional, or maybe even zero-dimensional, and don’t really contribute anything to the storyline.  As for plot, there’s really not much.  Maybe I loved Book Lovers because it was my first Emily Henry exposure, and now this book just feels like a cheap imitation.