Two best friends take one last summer trip together after two years of silence, each carrying feelings neither has been willing to name.

People We Meet on Vacation is a contemporary friends-to-lovers romance, published in 2021, built around the slow recognition that intimacy can be easier to avoid than desire. Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen have spent a decade taking annual vacations together until one disastrous trip breaks the friendship. Poppy arranges one final holiday in the hope of repairing it, while flashbacks reconstruct what has been lost.

The novel's most effective formal choice is its nonlinear structure. The alternating vacations let Henry build attraction through accumulation rather than sudden revelation, so small changes in how Poppy and Alex regard one another carry more weight than conventional romantic spectacle. The dialogue is the real engine: quick, affectionate and specific enough to make their friendship believable before asking us to accept it as romance.

The problem is pacing. Too many flashbacks repeat the same emotional information, and the central conflict remains suspended for so long that anticipation begins to resemble delay. The tension is strongest when the characters are together and weakest when the book retreats into another remembered vacation.

Compared with Beach Read and Love Lettering, it is warmer and more dependent on friendship than chemistry alone. Its payoff is emotionally sound, but it arrives after more circling than necessary.

A charming romance with excellent dialogue and an overextended middle. The book gets there, eventually.