Fasten your sheetbelts y’all, because The Dead Romantics is one boo-tiful ride. I came for the quirky concept, got hooked on the zoom-zoom juice, and stayed for the pun perfection. Read on for more on The Dead Romantics audiobook review. (Thanks to PRH Audio for a free audiobook to review, and for Berkley for providing a free digital copy of the title for this blog tour.) Also, I referred to my coffee as “zoom-zoom juice” this morning and my 7-year-old was absolutely delighted. I can’t wait to see how he uses the phrase in the future :).
About The Dead Romantics
Our FMC-Florence Day–is a romance ghostwriter who can literally talk to ghosts. She grew up in a small South Carolina town in a weird but loving family who owned a funeral parlor. When her boyfriend exploits her past to sell a book, Florence not only loses faith in love, but also the motivation to continue to write HEAs for a living. (Lee is the absolute WORST. I was dyyyying for him to get his comeuppance.)
Her new editor, handsome but grumpy Ben, refuses to give her a deadline extension. She gets a devastating reprieve when her beloved father dies, but when she returns home for the first time in ten years to bury him, the new editor has apparently found a new way to haunt her. Ben and Florence team up to find out what his “unfinished business” is, but the lines between life and death– and love and hate– get blurrier and blurrier.
Get Ready for All the Feels
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If you’re a crier, you’ll fluctuate between quietly sobbing and boo-hoo tears. Ashley has an incredibly authentic voice, and is spot-on in how she writes about grief. I love that while the subject matter is sad and, at times, dark, the story doesn’t feel like that. I think it’s a really great balance of slightly mournful with a touch of sorrow, but also really joyful and even pretty funny.
“It’s never easy. It’s also never really goodbye–and trust me,we’re in the business of goodbyes. The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched. There is no happy ending, there’s just,… happily living. As best you can. Or whatever. Metaphor-metaphor-simile shit.”
(Quote courtesy of emo little sis Alice and checked in finished copy.) BTW, Alice was part of the charming cast of side characters. Alice followed in dad’s undertaker footsteps, and while she is definitely as dark as you might expect, she also has some unexpected layers. I had an inkling about the path her character took later in the book, and I was pleased how her arc played out.
Honestly, I was nervous about how things would end up in the book. It’s a romance. He’s dead. How the hell are we getting a HEA? Ashley really pulled it off, with some unexpected little twists along the way.
The Dead Romantics Audiobook Deets:
I listened to much of the book on audio in the PRHAudio app. It’s narrated by Eileen Stevens, and runs just shy of 10 and a half hours. Eileen was a fantastic voice for Florence! As someone who listens to about twenty audiobooks a month, it can get a little tiring listening to the same narrators over and over again (despite how amazing they are), so having a fresh, new-to-me voice for the story only solidified how much I enjoyed the book. She had just a touch of a Southern twang that fit right into the small-town South Carolina setting. She easily kept up with the wide range of emotions and the overall tone of the book. I would wholeheartedly recommend The Dead Romantics audiobook to listeners!
You can grab the audiobook on Audible, Google Play, LibroFM, or look for it in your favorite audiobook listening app! The physical copy is also available here.