The Dead Romantics
by Ashley Poston
Summary
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.
My Review
Stopped the audiobook at the 25% mark.
1 star based on the portion I read.
I know this book has a lot of fans, but it absolutely did not work for me, and I ended up not finishing it. The story felt juvenile, and the execution fell flat on multiple levels. I didn’t connect with the tone, the humor, or the way the story tried to handle emotional moments. Nothing about it pulled me in or made me want to keep going.
The characters were a big part of the problem. I didn’t find any of them particularly likable or compelling, including Florence. I felt completely detached from her, her family, her friends, and the side characters. Because I wasn’t invested in any of them, the emotional beats had no impact on me.
There were also woke elements that felt forced rather than naturally woven into the story, which took me out of the reading experience. Some character traits and moments came across as box-checking rather than organic characterization (calling a character “them”), and the way certain details were introduced early on broke my immersion instead of adding depth to the world.
On top of that, the early chapters were cluttered with name-dropping that felt unnecessary and distracting. The paranormal element, which should have been a central and intriguing part of the story, felt oddly underdeveloped while I was reading. From what I later learned about how important that aspect becomes, it was frustrating that it felt like an afterthought in the portion I made it through. Overall, this was a disappointing DNF for me and not a book I plan to revisit.