Review: The Dead Romantics

goodreads summary

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This was a nice, easy book to lose yourself in on a hot summer day. I’d argue that it’s a good autumn book as well because of the cozy small town setting mixed with a hint of ghosts and a loving family who runs a funeral home.

The beginning of this book started off so strong. I immediately latched onto the main female character. I was screaming about the first fifty pages to my friends because I am the main character. A grandma in a young woman’s body who loves to dress for comfort, overthinks, and hauls an embarrassing amount of books on sad days that are somehow way too often… that’s me to a tee.

I loved the meet cute of our two main characters and especially loved their second meet cute.

Out of all the relationships explored in this book, I really liked the ones centered around family. I loved seeing our main character’s relationships with her siblings and especially her relationship with her father who recently passed. We can tell from the beginning that she shares a special with her father and Ashely Poston’s writing really stood out in these scenes because you could feel the closeness. It was so visually satisfying the way the author drew out the character’s arc for us. We got to see the mc being raised in a small town, running around in a funeral home under her father’s watchful eyes to growing up and leaving for a city where she only got to feel her father’s presence through voice. While I’m not dealing with the loss of a loved one but I think this feeling of growing up and distancing ourselves from our loved ones is something that’s universally relatable.

My main complaint with this book was that it didn’t do much for me. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters and the rest of the book was just okay.

My rating for the book started to dip after the first quarter of the book when I picked up on the author’s writing style. I don’t know if it was amplified by the first person POV but I felt like there was a lot of “telling not showing” in the book. Whenever the main character had a revelation about her self or her family, it was often written as “… this made me realize that…”. I wanted to feel the character changing and while I could see her change, I didn’t really feel it. I don’t think I connected to the character’s journey as much as I wanted to.

While I did enjoy the meet cute’s of our characters, I wasn’t really vested in their relationship. I don’t think that you should go into this book expecting a rom com. Personally for me, there wasn’t enough romance. The romance that was there, felt very surface level.

All in all, there wasn’t much tension in the book and the stakes weren’t that high for me.