I’m not sure where to start with The Dead Romantics – I loved it so much. It was heart warming, sweet, poignant, funny, and heart breaking. I laughed throughout, and cried throughout. And not just teared up, but full on crying, can’t see my puzzle enough to work on it, crying.
The Dead Romantics synopsis from StoryGraph:
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.
Thoughts
Florence is smart, sarcastic, and disillusioned with love. Her world is already going through upheaval with the end of her ghostwriting contract and difficulty writing about love. When her father passes away and she had to go home, which is not her favorite place. Even though she has wonderful memories of growing up, her family, and their home, the funeral parlor. She can see/talk with ghosts – an ability she shared with her father – and was run out of town because of it.
Ben is stoic, handsome, and dead. He shows up at Florence’s home confused and unaware that he is dead. Florence is convinced she has to help him in some way so he can move on. But Ben feels like he is there to help her with her grief and to believe in love again.
They barely knew each other, but started to form a friendship. Ben is with her as she works through her father’s will, learns it’s ok to ask for (and accept) help, lets herself be loved by her family, and regains confidence in her writing/love. He sees her and lets her grieve without trying to fix it or judge it. Despite not being able to touch, they form an intimacy that made my heart swell.
One random thing I loved: romance author name drops. I smiled so big every time she mentioned a loved author and ones I am just discovering.
“I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
Ashley Poston
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost – it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.”
The Dead Romantics was a sweet book about grief, love, and coming back to yourself. There were so many tears! Any book that makes me feel that deeply and still come out smiling and filled with joy – goes on the favorites shelf!
