Title: The Dead Romantics
Author: Ashley Poston
Publication: 28 June 2022
Format: Kindle eARC via NetGalley & Jove/Berkley
A disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who,
quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, has to find her way back
home in this sparkling adult debut from national bestselling author
Ashley Poston.
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.
Ramble-y Teaserish Stuff
Oh my heck.
This book.
I mean ... really ... this book.
From the very beginning I fell in love with poor disillusioned Florence and I felt her feelings from deep within my very soul. By the time I hit 19% I had already filled two pages of my reading journal with quotes and began to question if I would ever be able to come close to doing it justice with just the beginning and one other blurb. I started debating said blurbs as early as 6%.
It'd been a year since The Breakup -- everyone has at least one in their lives. You know the one, right? The kind of breakup from a love you thought would last your entire lifetime, only to find your heart ripped out with a spork by your former lover and placed on a silver platter with FUCK YOU written in ketchup.
I was so tempted to use that. But, really, I was only 6% in and there was still 94% of options left to go. So I kept going. And going. And almost didn't sleep. And definitely didn't eat. And even thought about calling in for a mental health night at work ... especially after the 12% option almost killed me.
Love was a high for a moment that left you hollow when it left, and you spent the rest of your life chasing that feeling. A false memory, too good to be true, and I'd been fooling myself for far too long, believing in Grand Romantic Gestures and Happily Ever Afters.
Still too early and probably too depressing and still 88% left. And, really, it isn't a depressing book at all. Well, not entirely. I could blurb some of the moments that made me snort my coffee. I could fill an entire collage box with puns or gallows humor or Elvis or the multi-term mayor, Fetch, who just happens to be a golden retriever. I could go on for days about the multitudes of moments that ended up feeling like a rib-cracking hug from her dad. Her entirely family, really. Or her ghost.
I'm opting for the ghost and one not-so-short blurb from 43%.
The rest you'll have to just read for yourself.
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"Teaser Tuesday" at The Purple Booker asks for a random line or two from anywhere in the book currently being read.
