The Romance Novel That Knows What It Is and Is Not Embarrassed

Book Lovers is about Nora Stephens, a literary agent who is always the career woman who gets left behind when her clients' muses sweep them to small towns and happy endings. When she actually goes to a small town and keeps running into Charlie Lastra, a book editor she has clashed with professionally, the novel becomes a meditation on the tropes it is consciously operating inside. Emily Henry is most herself here and it is the most satisfying of her novels for it.