Emily Henry is Summer in Human Form

June 16, 2022 by Reagan Fleming

It’s summertime, and summertime calls for Emily Henry books. It’s a rule. People We Meet on Vacation was my first EH read, and I basically inhaled it in a matter of two days. In honor of Henry’s Book Lovers coming out last month, I wanted to write a book review of my first read of hers.

If there were three words that could describe People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, they would be: quirky, quirky, and quirky. Narrator Poppy Wright is a travel writer for Rest + Relaxation, a magazine that allows her to travel to far and wide places on the company’s dime. Even before she gained travel-writing and Instagram fame, Poppy and her college acquaintance-turned-best friend named Alex Nilsen made a tradition of taking yearly summer trips that the both of them would wait all year for. Even though they are complete opposites physically—Alex: tall and athletic, and Poppy: petite and couldn’t care less about exercise—her outgoing and oftentimes dominating personality complements his loyalty and dry sense of humor. This book may fall under the genre of romance, but if you are looking for a book that contains friendship, a deeper meaning that just might make you cry and cause you to look inward, and a narrator with a sense of humor that will make you outright laugh to the point of shushing yourself in public spaces, People We Meet on Vacation is right up your alley.

The book travels (pun intended) back and forth between the summers throughout Alex and Poppy’s interwoven lives from Vancouver Island, New Orleans, a last-minute trip to Nashville, and even a couple’s trip to Tuscany with their respective partners at the time. People We Meet on Vacation paints a timeline for the reader by centering each chapter on a specific summer in the past or present day. This organization of the main characters’ lives ultimately serves as a clear countdown for the reader to follow and finally find out what happened between Alex and Poppy “two summers ago,” a chapter in which a vacation trip changed everything for the two travel companions.

The narration stays in the hands of Poppy Wright, but no need to fear, reader. People We Meet on Vacation promises pages upon pages of romance, quirkiness (so much so that it’s said four times now within a few hundred words), and the classic “falling for your best friend” trope that the author writes in such a way that it somehow doesn’t feel overworked. You will grow with Poppy and Alex through these thirteen summers of the book as they find themselves as friends, to more than friends, to friends again, and all the stops in between.

Henry’s other works include the New York Times bestseller, Beach Read, as well as A Million Junes, The Love That Split the World, Hello Girls, and When the Sky Fell on Splendor. Check out Henry’s latest novel, Book Lovers! It’ll make you say: “Charlie Lastra is my soulmate.”

Reagan Fleming

Some Days You're Writing, Some Days You're Reading

November 20, 2021 by Reagan Fleming

“Write something that you would like to read.”

We’ve all heard this advice from other writers or people who are sick of you griping about dealing with writer’s block still. If someone told me this bit of advice right now (since it’s felt like I’ve run into writer’s block for the past year), I would say back: “What I really want to read is Red, White & Royal Blue or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl for the first time again, but I can’t write their sequels justice, nor would I want to try.”

So, here we are.

Lately, I’ve gotten into the (probably not-so-healthy) habit of diving into and completely losing myself in a book. I did that with Casey McQuinston’s latest novel, One Last Stop, and most recently, her debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue. I even jumped on the Young Royals train, which is streaming on Netflix, because I clearly couldn’t get enough of the “forbidden romance due to one of the parties being a royal” scenario. Now that I’ve run out of episodes and pages, I finished up Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, and now I’m reading Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. Salem’s Lot was pretty good and got very creepy, but I wanted to just dive into a nice lil romance novel again. Enter: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, which has since snowballed into other romance/fiction: Beach Read by Henry, The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, and now Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Hibbert.

Red, White & Royal Blue and People We Meet on Vacation were both books that literally made me laugh out loud, tear up, and really feel for the characters when crazy stuff came up in their lives. When I discovered McQuinston and Henry, I absolutely flew through those books—I’d ignore my everyday life after the workday ended, and I happily hunkered down by my reading tree with a White Claw in hand and my dog running around in the yard around me.

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

— Anne Lamott, "Bird by Bird"

I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing, but around the time when my dad got sick, I really threw myself into reading. It might sound like a time-waster to some, but who cares? Those books I read helped me a lot during that time. I was really young when he got sick and died a few months later, and there was a lot that I didn’t know how to deal with—I mean, heck, I was 12. I didn’t want to have to think about what was going on around me, so I read books about other peoples’ lives while trying to ignore mine. Reading gave me an escape when I needed one, and it still does. Now, I will say that dealing with your emotions up-front is probably the best-case scenario here, but sometimes you just need a break—an emotional, mental, or physical one. I will shout this from the rooftops until the day I die: reading can help people get out of their heads while also building compassion for those around them. It can spur something creative inside, unlock something emotional deep down that you didn’t know you could tap into, and it can also just bring you joy.

Whenever I thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always knew that I wanted to write. I transferred colleges multiple times, but I always kept the same major: writing (or English literature if writing wasn’t available). And when I think about why, it always goes back to the time when my dad got sick, and I discovered Sarah Dessen’s books for the first time. I found copies of Just Listen, That Summer, and The Truth About Forever at a book sale one day with my mom, and I begged her to buy them for me. I’d find myself staying up until 3 in the morning to just get one more chapter in or to finally be able to flip the last page over, feeling that pride of knowing I’ve finished another book. That pride, however, was almost always followed by a sinking feeling, knowing that I would never be able to read it for the first time again. If you haven’t read any of her books yet, Dessen’s books are normally everyday stories about girls and their relationships with their parents, love interests, friends, summer jobs, self-image, etc. She has a way of making mundane topics relatable and interesting, and I’ve read every single book of hers since. Her books allow me to just drop right into the story and live out someone else’s life for however long it takes me to finish a few hundred pages, and I’m grateful.

This quote above, which graces the very last page and last paragraph of Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, is what I have tattooed on the back of my arm. It’s probably about 3” tall x 4” wide. Before you think, “Was it written in the tiniest font size known to man?” No. I will settle your confusion by saying that each sentence is just written as a line, and each period is, well, a period. No one else except you, precious lil readers, and those who actually ask know what those lines on the back of my arms stand for. It’s laid out on my skin like a paragraph with the indentation and everything, but I still somehow get asked if it’s a sideways barcode.

Since I was about 13 or so, I’ve been trying to crank out a young adult novel. Back in the day, I used to only write on Word or Pages, and I didn’t think to backup anything to The Cloud or, god forbid, an external hard drive. So when I spilled a pumpkin spice latte on my computer one day after class, I lost my book that I had been working on for years. I only got… three or four solid chapters worked out, so it shouldn’t have been a huge deal, but I had been editing the heck out of those chapters for years and developed an entire timeline for all of the characters, and both were gone. I have since discovered a lovely thing called Google Drive and *cough cough* Squarespace, so the stuff that I’m working on currently, albeit not much, is safe.

Fast-forward a few years later, after a long time of having writer’s block strictly for a novel (poetry, blog posts, articles, and a children’s book somehow weren’t affected in this writer’s block?) and I’m in the process of writing a book once again. I started up again after I finished reading Emily Henry’s Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation, because I felt like I had this new outlook on what a novel could be. I audibly laughed out loud many times (not that silent laugh or a sharp huff out of my nose), and I definitely cried once or twice. I was able to fully immerse myself into those stories, and I knew after I flipped that last page that that doesn’t happen with every book. And I want to create those special books for someone too.

Reagan Fleming

Birds

June 21, 2021 by Reagan Fleming

I don’t have a very good track record with birds.

I had a pet cockatiel when I was a kid, and her name was Bella. I was obsessed with birds and did a bunch of research in the hopes of one day obtaining a bird for myself. Like the true nerd that I am, I also begged my parents to take me to the lorikeet habitat at the zoo as often as possible. The zoo was not located close to our house, and yet my mom graciously drove me to and fro as often as (if I remember correctly) two times a week. Bless her heart. Sometimes my dad would get roped into these lorikeet adventures as well on the weekends, and like the picture below shows, he’d join me in feeding them. Looking back, I truly had no idea why I liked birds so much. I grew up with a greyhound named Goose that I’ve written about before in the poem titled—you guessed it—Goose. We then added two Maltese pups into the mix, and shortly after that, Bella the cockatiel. I’ve always been a fan of animals and even wanted to be a veterinarian for a time, but after helping out at a dog grooming business for a few weeks, that quickly changed.

I will start this paragraph by saying that I saw the Twilight movies for the first time in college, so I absolutely did not name Bella after a certain Ms. Swan. It was when we were on the drive back from a bird fair—I know, I keep sounding like a cooler kid the more I write—that my dad suggested naming the little 6-month old cockatiel I just got: Bella. Her bright eyes peeked up at me from inside the unsealed cardboard box that was sitting in my lap, and I thought that “Bella” fit. She was a “white-faced cinnamon pearl” cockatiel, which basically means she was ashy gray with white spots—she was beautiful. Her eyes would droop and she’d start falling into your hand if you messaged her tiny neck surrounded by her dense feathers, and she was trained to step onto your finger if you laid it flat in front of her feet and said, “Step up!” My parents drove me 45 minutes each way to that dang bird fair, which was essentially a massive warehouse with a bunch of booths of people selling birds and people walking around looking to buy said birds. It was a weird time, my elementary school years.

I tried to train Bella to poop on cue, but that didn’t work, nor did I have the patience for any sort of consistency needed to train a bird to do something like that. So, I’d simply put a paper towel over my shoulder and place her on top, like I was a homeschooled pirate, and walk around my house. Speaking of poop (a segue I never thought I’d use), after all of those hours spent at the lorikeet habitat, not once did those brightly-colored birds poop on me. Yet, after making a quick shortcut through their habitat to get to another section of the zoo on my 12th birthday, one pooped directly on my head. I’ll always remember angrily washing bird poop out of my hair in the zoo bathroom on my birthday. That was the last day I visited the lorikeet habitat.

Less than a year later, my dad got sick and passed away 4 months after his diagnosis. I guess my brain that refused to grieve for a long time didn’t want to put two and two together, so I simply thought that I didn’t want to spend time with Bella as much anymore. I’d rather cuddle with my fluffy dogs instead. Bella would chirp and chirp throughout the day, essentially begging someone to play with her, but I had no desire to do so. My mom and I came to the realization that it would be best if she went to be with another family. So, as any kid does, I wrote an ad for my homeschool co-op newspaper about a cockatiel I was selling. Another girl who attended that co-op saw my ad took Bella off my hands, and our house then became a lot quieter.

Years later, I attended a local community college to get some gen eds out of the way. After I was finished with classes one day during my freshman year, I had this sudden boost of confidence come out of nowhere. I thought to myself, “Hey, you’re in college now. You need to keep your head high and walk with confidence!” I walked out one of the sets of double doors, raised my head, and looked at those around me instead of looking down and focusing on the next step my feet would be taking. Step step step step—I was feeling great! I took a few more steps, and then I felt and heard the crunch of what I prayed was just a lone bag of Lays chips that had separated itself from someone’s backpack and somehow miraculously slid under my foot. I took a few more steps forward, and as I looked back to see what I had stepped on, I saw a bloody mound of a dead bird with bones sticking out every which way and thick, bloody shoe prints that led to where I was now standing. What started as just a random boost of self-confidence had turned into me stumbling away, hunched over, a hand over my mouth, gagging as the shoe prints got less and less bloody as I walked to my car to head home.

Don’t worry—I have since thrown away my “bird shoes,” as I liked to call them. Thankfully, now that I’m in my 20s, I haven’t been pooped on by any birds or stepped on any birds, dead or alive. So, maybe my track record is improving in that department. Just in case, I think I’ll stick to dogs as pets from now on. I’m grateful that my parents encouraged my love of animals and took time out of their weeks to let me visit the lorikeets at the zoo or take me to the library to check out dog encyclopedias—that’s a story for another day. Yesterday was Father’s Day, and it had me thinking about how despite working full-time at a corporate job, my dad made time for all of us kids. Saturday mornings eating cinnamon-sugar toast, drinking a glass of milk before bedtime and watching an episode of Chuck, sitting in the maple tree out front and playing the “car” game, or spending a few hours at the lorikeet habitat at the zoo. He’d ask me questions about my day, despite the fact that I was a homeschooled elementary school kid, and the most exciting thing that could happen to me in a day would be how Arthur was on twice in one day or I found a salamander in the pool filter.

Birds remind me of lorikeets who love to poop on heads, and they remind me of that one time in community college that I almost threw up in the common area. But they also remind me of Bella, and in turn, my dad and how much he cared.

Reagan Fleming