The Dead Romantics: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

4.2 | 13,259 ratings

Price: 17.33

Last update: 01-04-2025

About this item

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022!

The New York Times Bestseller and Good Morning America Book Club Pick!

"I LOVED this book! ...Funny, breathtaking, hopeful, and dreamy.”—Ali Hazelwood, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis

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.

"One of the Summer's Hottest Reads"—Entertainment Weekly

Matthew M Johnson

I loved this book. Full stop.

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2024

I loved this book. Full stop. It was endearing, and simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming.

In terms of actual critique, this is one of those books that my brain initially responds with “no notes!” Truly, the concept was interesting and original; the plot was well constructed; the female protagonist was rich and well developed with clear motivations, and her arc and development were beautiful and relatable. The icing on the cake for me was that the prose was beautiful. This was so unexpectedly well written that half way through the book I was hopping on goodreads to add Poston’s other books to my TBR (joke’s on me, they were already there). That prose was definitely interspersed with some less compelling, informal dialogue. I didn’t love “zoom zoom juice,” but I don’t think I hated it as much as some people seemed to. Supporting characters were much less well developed. In the context of having diverse representation, I think you really run the risk of characters feeling like caricatures or cliches. I had the opposite reaction. The elements of these characters’ identities to which we were introduced were not their entire defining characteristic. From the POV of our protagonist, it wasn’t the most important thing about that person. So, essentially, a gay character is not defined by his sexual orientation, he just is a character who happens to be gay. I loved that because it didn’t make everyone’s identity a plot point or a device for social commentary, it felt like well executed respectful representation of the world in which we live. I wouldn’t consider it compulsively readable in the way some books are, but then again, sometimes you need to breathe for a second to digest content like this. For context though, I still gobbled this up in two (work) days because I was hooked.

The only thing that annoyed me was the fact that some characters (or maybe it was just the one) were referred to by their full name every time they were mentioned. I can’t imagine a less critical criticism.

This book is a definite re-read for me and there will be a physical copy on my trophy shelf very soon.

Kristen Killen

While You Were Sleeping.....But more magical AND more romantic!!!! <3

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2023

I made 41 highlights and left 33 notes in this ebook. I would go so far as to say this is probably one of my most annotated first read through of a book. Not all of my notes were very nice, as much as I enjoyed this book, at least half of my feelings for it were hate reading. It has such good reviews and I've seen so many people rave about it on bookstagram and booktok and such, so I just had to read it! It is very good. It is beautifully written, very quotable, and truly a lovely romance. HOWEVER. My curse of hating leading ladies strikes again. Because Florence Day is so utterly unlikable for most of this book.

That's not entirely true. She is not unlikable. But holy cow does she make INFURIATING decisions. It's incredible that we learned anything in this book because she is never around other characters enough to know anything of what's going on! She does get some very good character development, and I appreciate that very much. Because man I really was always 5 words from a DNF for the first half of this book.

I loved how this book dealt with grieving and death though. You saw it in small doses and large doses. How sometimes grief is just with you every step of your day, and other times you can completely forget about it until the wind changes and all of a sudden you remember. Sometimes you can't even think louder than the sadness, and sometimes it's just a whisper in the back of your mind while you move on with living. The idea that this extremely loving happy family deals in death is kind of a beautiful one. I liked this way this book honored the dead.

And of course, the romance is VERY swoony. Florence, despite the way she was described for the first few chapters, is a pretty dreamy chaos goblin once she gets her act in gear. And Benji Andor is a very dreamy hero. Even if he's intangible for much of the book. The biggest love story of this book is between me and the puns though! They were very good!

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