Romantic Comedy Book Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog! I want to talk about the book, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. This was one of my BOTM books, and to be honest I was really disappointed. So, let’s get into it!

Romantic Comedy is about Sally, the equivalent of a SNL writer falling for, Noah, a celebrity who is a guest star on the show. This had so much potential to be amazing, but it unfortunately, fell really flat for me.

There were a lot of things I didn’t particularly care for. One being the writing style. There were so many inner monologues and information dumps and not enough dialogue between characters. I’m talking huge 20+ line paragraphs of just straight up text. No dialogue. I needed more character communication instead of just telling me all this information.

The other thing was that I didn’t find any of the sketches funny. A lot of what the characters would laugh at and find hilarious, I didn’t care for. But a cool thing was to see how working on SNL might seem like. This felt like the perfect “day-in-my-life” vibe of an actual SNL writer. Not that I can confirm, but it would be cool.

But what I hated the most was this book mentions Covid! I didn’t realize that or expect it, and honestly if I knew it was going to, I wouldn’t have picked it. Reading about Covid or any mention of the pandemic automatically bumps me from the story. I don’t want to read about it period. It takes all the fun out of reading (for me personally). Honestly, it might even be some PTSD. The main character, Noah describes what it was like to have Covid and just no. I can’t. I’m no longer in the story, I’m thinking about my personal experiences.

So, in the book, Noah appears on The Night Owls (TNO) which is the SNL-like show. Then the pandemic hits about 2 years later, and he contacts Sally via email. They haven’t spoken since he wrapped on the show. For a good 50 or so pages, it’s just them emailing back and forth. I didn’t like just reading emails, but I was already in too deep to DNF.

Also, there were three chapters across 300 pages…WHY? At that point, just break the story into three parts and have small chapters. No one is going to complain about small chapters. The first chapter was just filler and fluff and honestly a lot of the information was so unnecessary. I skimmed parts because, again, one whole page would be one paragraph. There were breaks in the text in the first part, but otherwise you’d have to stop randomly on a page which I hate doing.

The romance between Sally and Noah also really fell flat for me as well. I didn’t feel any passion or chemistry. Most of the time, Sally was just annoying.

Honestly, it was really the Covid thing that put the nail in the coffin. I can’t get past that. It doesn’t make reading fun for me personally.

Overall, I would rate this 1/5 stars. I wouldn’t recommend. This is not the book you want to read to get you out of a slump, and I wouldn’t read this book if you’re looking for more of the romance aspect.

Alright folks, that is all I have for this week! I feel bad ending this post on such a bad note, but sometimes there are books that just aren’t it. Come back next Wednesday for another (happier) blog post! As always, thank you for reading:)