Rating: 78% | C+ | ★★★☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance is most certainly dead... but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories. Spoiler-Free Review: I have a certain respect for three-star books. They remind me that I—or my reading preferences—am capable of being indifferent. The Dead Romantics does not elicit the choked-back tears of Beach Read, nor does it inspire an itch to chuck it across the room as The Idiot does. Instead, The Dead Romantics is very simply—fine. (I also have a soft spot for The Dead Romantics because I bought it at McNally Jackson and now I can be smug about having a direct-ish connection to the start of the book.) It starts with a relatively fresh premise: a young ghostwriter returns home to help with her father's funeral and unexpectedly bumps into her newly dead editor. But the rest of the story lacks legs: Florence and Benji's romance is never quite fleshed out; Florence's individual arc feels two-dimensional and the solution feels self-evident; and the resolution of the novel is a messy tribute to deus ex machina. Neither Florence nor Benji are particularly complex characters, and I feel that Benji was written as a mere tribute to the idea of the "grumpy male hero" rather than organically developing into that trope. This book also feels like a cobbled-together version of tropes from other novels; an acute sense of déjà vu from Beach Read gripped me as I read the scene with Benji in the hospital. Love wasn't a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.
But Poston tries her best. There is plenty of heart in The Dead Romantics, from Florence's struggle to overcome the identity her ex-boyfriend projected onto her to Benji's struggle to come to terms with his death and his burgeoning relationship with Florence. This is a book for readers who want a light, fall-tinged story that will leave them feeling much lighter at the end.
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From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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