Jack Duggan’s Reviews > Penguin Romantic Comedy. > Status Update

This is quite endearing in the way it’s realistically presenting how people approach romance, instead of being a Hallmark movie. Ugh I really hope this doesn’t start making me actually *like* romance novels.

Things are going awfully well considering there’s still 100+ pages to go

Despite myself this has grown on me. The emails leading to phone calls perfectly capture the feelings of dating apps in the Covid era, talking for the first time at a distance and gradually gaining confidence with each person on familiar territory

Well that’s the epistolary bit done, which got though 20% of the book very quickly. I quite enjoyed it, partly because it felt very of-the-time for that period, but thunk I’m glad it’s done and it’s going to be a novel again

175 pages in and it’s suddenly become an email epistolary thing, which looks like it’s going to go on for about 80 pages which is odd, but this bit is set during Covid so I guess there isn’t much to narrate outside of it

Ugh this is doing that thing The Dead Romantics did where the protagonist is a writer who is writing a Romance (novel; screenplay) but “just can’t seem to find the right ending” because they’re so jaded and tired of love and yaaaaawn

The not-quite-real-time-but-close-enough vibe really works for this

I think I know what the big emotional twist might be, but this also means I’m getting worryingly ‘into it’

I feel like there is a bit of dissonance between this wanting to be a challenging, feminist, realist take on romcoms, and wanting to just actually be a cheesy feelgood romcom, but I am feeling like she can possibly pull it off

Still struggling with it feeing quite tell-not-show, but to its credit it reads very smoothly (also it’s still mostly not funny, but again that sort of fits the context)