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 parlour, 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 parlour’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. 

Florence Day no long believes in love. The only problem, she is the ghost writer for one of the most prolific romance writers out there and she is long overdue on her latest book. When she goes to meet her new editor to ask for a deadline he refuses and Florence is stuck wondering how she can write this happily ever after when she no longer believes in them. But then the unthinkable happens, she receives a phone call saying her father has died. Returning to the town that she felt ran her out isn’t something she’s looking forward too, made all the more awkward when she finds a ghost standing at the front door of her family’s funeral home, and not just any ghost, but the ghost of her editor, Benji, and he’s understandably just as confused by his appearance as she is. Romance my be dead, but so is her infuriatingly hot editor and his unfinished business will have Florence questioning things about herself, her job and love. Maybe, just maybe, happily ever afters do exist after all.

I’ll admit, I went into this book with a fair idea of how it would go, but boy did I get it wrong. The Dead Romantics tells the story of Florence Day, a character I instantly fell in love with. She’s the kind of quirky romance lead I love, but through her, Poston also deals with some hard hitting topics such as death and grief. We start the story with Florence absolutely sure that true love doesn’t exists, but through the book she starts to realise that love can come from the strangest of places and may just appear when you least expect it. She really grows as a character through this book, and thanks to a friend gets to delve more into her relationships both romantic and not, and she gets a better perspective on life and what’s truly important.

Understandably, this story deals, in large part, with death and the grief that follows. Poston shows the different ways in which people grieve, the different ways in which they come to accept loss. It was an incredibly realistic view, and I couldn’t help but empathise with Florence, with her need to take up the mantel of eldest sibling, to take on impossible jobs determined not to ask for help, to not show weakness. Poston shows that grief isn’t the end of love, but rather the celebration of it, we grieve the time we spent with someone, all the small moments that we will never get to experience again, but will always be a huge part of who we are.

I loved the romance arc in this book, and this was the part of the story I thought I had nailed down, but Poston managed to absolutely floor me with her ending. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Florence open up to Ben about so many things she feels are a weakness, but in fact are things that so many people experience. They teach each other new things, bring about new experiences and Ben slowly but surely gets Florence to believe that love might just be in the cards for her. It’s hard to talk about them fully without giving away spoilers, but it’s safe to say that I adored the ending and was so happy it ended the way it did.

This story was bittersweet, heartwarming, sad in parts, but also filled with so much hope. Poston has a knack for writing characters that you instantly fall in love with, and this story was no different. It’s definitely a quirky read, but I adored reading Florence’s story and seeing her slowly open up to the people that love her and come to realise that she doesn’t have to carry the weight of the world alone. An easy 4/5 stars.