Emily Henry

🎧📽️ Reviewed by LD

⚠️ Full spoilers for both the book and the movie ahead. If you haven’t read or watched yet, go do that first. We’ll be here.

Already read the book? Check out the full spoiler review here before diving in.

The Setup

I already love this story going in, so walking into the movie adaptation I wanted to be fair. Movies adapted from books are always going to take creative liberties and not every plot point is going to survive the transition from page to screen. But there are some changes that work, and some that just don’t. Let’s talk about both.

The book opens with Poppy in the present day, deeply unhappy despite having everything she thought she wanted, realizing her last truly happy moment was two years ago on vacation with Alex. She reaches out, they plan one more trip to Palm Springs, and the story unfolds from there through alternating timelines. The movie opens differently. We see Poppy lonely on a solo vacation, and then she gets a call from David, Alex’s brother, saying he’s getting married in Barcelona. That’s how they reconnect.

Another big change right off the top. In the book, R&R declines to fund the Palm Springs trip and Poppy ends up paying for everything herself. She has to confess this to Alex later, which becomes a whole loaded moment between them. In the movie, R&R is fully on board and sends her to Barcelona to write about destination weddings instead of her Santorini trip that was planned. Clean and simple, sure. But it removes a layer of Poppy’s character that I didn’t want to lose, her bootstrap ability, her make it work no matter what ability. In the book she has a blog about travelling on the cheap which is how she got her job, it showed how she could make any trip work. Removing that point took out a lot of friction points.

The First Meeting and the Flashbacks

Both versions start the friendship at a shared car ride home, which I appreciated. In the movie they basically hate each other at first. Alex is punctual and organized, Poppy is late and chaotic. She accidentally locks him out of his own car at a gas station, they end up stranded, and have to spend the night at a hotel. It’s a fun enough scene.

One thing the movie does well is capturing Poppy’s energy visually. She’s sunny and colorful and a little all over the place in the best way. That’s harder to convey in a book and they cast her really well.

The Condoms, the Bear Statue, and the Boat Tour

I have to talk about the condoms. In the book, when Alex comes to pick Poppy up for their Nashville trip, her mom sends her off with this giant massive box of sheepskin condoms, just in case he’s allergic, and I was absolutely losing it. It is such a funny, specific, mortifying detail. In the movie they kept the lambskin condom bit but it’s just a regular little four-pack box. You have to feel the weight of that enormous box to get the full cringe of the book version. It’s just not the same.

The bear statue “does it speak to you” moment makes it into the movie, which I was happy about, but again how that came about was different, it wasn’t the inside joke they had in the book. Just one line in the movie where Poppy says it speaks to her. The boat tour and the guide inviting them to camp are there too. But the movie adds a skinny dipping scene where Alex ends up making out with a girl named Daisy, his clothes get washed out to sea, and he comes back to find Poppy in the middle of a makeout with the water taxi guy while clearly high and not really into it.

In the book that scene plays out differently. Poppy is about to hook up with the water taxi guy, decides she’s not into it, and he tells her if she’s not going to have sex with him she can leave. The crummy feeling is Poppy’s to carry in that version, not Alex’s. I think the book version is better here. It’s her experience, her moment, and it makes more sense that it’s hers to sit with, instead of Alex feeling bad.

The Tuscany Trip and the Pregnancy Scare

Both versions have the pregnancy scare in Tuscany, where Poppy thinks she might be pregnant and Alex is the one she leans on. In the movie, they almost kiss but Alex pulls back at the last second. Poppy says she didn’t mean it. He asks what he is to her and she says her best friend.

And then the very next morning, he proposes to Sarah.

That moment is a gut punch and the movie deserves credit for it.

In the book the vasectomy subplot comes out later and I really loved that detail. Alex was so rattled by the pregnancy scare that he got a vasectomy without even telling Sarah, but he never did propose. It’s a messy, very human thing that shows how checked out he already was from that relationship. The movie doesn’t go there.

The Falling Out and What Comes After

In the book, Croatia is where everything falls apart. They get drunk, make out, Poppy wants to keep going and Alex puts on the brakes because he thinks she’s not over her breakup. She plays it cool and acts like she’s fine with stopping. They aren’t. And they just stop talking, because neither of them knows how to come back from it as friends.

The movie version plays out differently with the previously mentioned Tuscany scene, but the core of it is the same. Two people who love each other and can’t figure out how to say it without blowing everything up.

The Grand Gesture and the Ending

The book ending is really good. Poppy goes to Alex’s school to find him. She can’t get in. She ends up running into Sarah, who has known all along that it was always Poppy, and Sarah is the one who tells her where he actually is. She gets there, confesses everything, and he turns her down. He tells her it doesn’t make sense. And then when she leaves he chases after her, because his therapist told him he’s afraid of being happy and she’s what happy looks like to him. He moves to New York.

The movie goes a different direction. Poppy runs after Alex through the street, she says she hates running, and she gives this speech about how she always thought if she stayed in one place too long people would realize she was too much. But he’s not a vacation to her. He’s home. It’s a good line. I’ll give it that. But they feel like 2 different endings.

But I miss the Sarah moment. In the book, Sarah gets this small but really important role where she not only gives Poppy the push she needs but confirms what we all already suspected: she saw this coming before either of them would admit it. That’s a much more satisfying way to close that storyline than a chance airport run-in with a flight attendant.

What the Movie Did Better

Poppy’s personality translates well on screen. The wig scene, the New Orleans trip, her whole chaotic sunny energy just pops visually in a way that’s hard to pull off on a page. Both leads are cast well and the essence of the story is there.

What the Movie Got Wrong

Losing Poppy’s blog hurt. That was a real piece of her character in the book, this scrappy travel-on-the-cheap thing she built before landing the magazine job. It’s part of who she is and it just disappears. Her blogger friend from the book barely registers here either.

The no-AC disaster in the book is so much funnier and more in depth- it has more of a storyline. It’s this ongoing nightmare that keeps escalating and creates so much forced proximity tension. In the movie it’s basically a footnote.

And I have to say it: Alex looks too young. Because the story spans six to eight years and they don’t do much to age him up on screen, by the time you get to the romance scenes near the end he still looks like a teenager, which gave me the ick. It made those moments really hard to take seriously and I found myself cringing when I should have been rooting for them.

Book or Movie?

I liked both, and I think if you’ve only seen the movie you’d be happy with it. But the book wins for me, and not just because I read it first. The book has more layers. The vasectomy detail, the blog, the full weight of the Sarah subplot, Poppy having funded the whole trip herself and having to admit it. The movie captures the spirit of the story reasonably well but it trimmed some of the things that made the story feel real.

If you’ve seen the movie and loved it, read the book. You’ll love it even more.