Book Review | The Dead Romantics #20booksofsummer23

Book 12 of my summer reading challenge and the last of my holiday books.

The Dead Romantics
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.

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I have had this on my shelf for quite some time and I don’t know what made me pick it up this month but I am so glad I did. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting but I absolutely loved this book, it was amazing, and I’m so glad I had some uninterrupted time to read it because otherwise, I would have been obsessive trying to get back to it.

I wasn’t sure how the supernatural part of this book would work but it was brilliant and I liked that it gave me a bit of a different outlook on death. It was so positive for a book that features death so heavily and I really appreciated some of the messages that I could take away from it.

At its heart it is a romance, a lovely slow-burn one, but it’s also a story about connection and family and managing together through difficult times. This makes it sound like it’s a sad book but it is surprisingly uplifting at the same time as being a bit emotional, I’m not going to lie I did have a good cry at this one but in a nice cathartic way.

I loved Florence, I like that she started in a bad place but managed to pull through it. I enjoyed her jaded character but I also enjoyed getting to see how much freer she felt when she worked through what was holding her back. It was also good to see her come to terms with her ability to talk to ghosts and that she gets the chance to see that it isn’t an entirely negative thing.

Ben was also great and they worked so well together as they navigated trying to find his unresolved business and trying to help Florence resolve things with her family. The chemistry between them though was delicious in a way that I’m not sure I can capture accurately, it was a very sweet but forbidden love type vibe, just spot on. I have to say that I wasn’t sure how this book was going to end, I mean Ben being a ghost is a bit of a barrier to a lasting romance, but the author handled this perfectly too.

The Dead Romantics is a very unique book, it has so many wonderful elements that have created an emotional and joyful story that I highly recommend that everybody reads.