This Adult romance author has received enormous support and buzz on Tiktok, but what is her secret? 

The release of Happy Place, Emily Henry’s fourth book, brought a lot of attention to her. Henry trended on TikTok’s Booktok with readers raving about the emotions her work made them feel.  

She has put out four widely successful adult romance novels in four years. And readers are not sick of the love tropes.  

The stories of Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers, and Happy Place are all very similar.  

They focus on people and on love and use the most classic romance tropes.  

Beach Read uses the miscommunication trope. Book Lovers uses the small-town romance trope along with the love/hate trope.  

People We Meet on Vacation goes big on the best friends to lovers trope, which is very similar to Cecelia Ahern’s Where Rainbows End which was made into the movie Love, Rosie, but seems to have a quicker happy ending.  

And in her newest book Happy Place, the protagonists Harriet and Wyn are a broken-up couple stuck on vacation with friends who think they are still engaged – the classic forced proximity trope.  

There are many writers whose stories are similar, but readers have been obsessed with Henry’s stories like no other.  

What is her secret? 

It may occur to anyone familiar with any of her books that all of Henry’s characters are filled with insecurities.  She takes the most familiar tropes and adds the most complicated people to them.  

Forced proximity in Happy Place is complemented by Harriet and Wyn’s individual insecurities, trauma, and weaknesses that make these real and relatable. 

It seems that Henry’s efforts in carefully articulating what each person is feeling – through points of view in her narration and through a solid character story, is what gets readers to pick up her next book without question. 

Additionally, she writes of break-up, of divorce, of childhood trauma, communication issues, the love of books – things we can all relate to on some level. 

Readers seem to pick up an Emily Henry book to feel something, rather than for just the romantic satisfaction of it. They resonate with the insecurities that the characters carry and are deeply impacted by the enormity of the feelings that the author writes about.  

While there is nothing relatable to the average reader about moving to a small-town to pursue writing or trying to unravel the mysteries of one’s father’s secret love life, everything about these characters is made relatable through their fears and real problems. 

Henry has won the Goodreads Choice Awards consecutively for People we Meet on Vacation and Book Lovers. Booktok readers were obsessed with Happy Place and looking for every version of the book within a week.  

This author carries the magic of making her characters relatable, but also keeping them just a little unrealistic. And it seems to have worked perfectly for her. 

What trope will she use next to keep us obsessed?