The Dead Romantics

 Love, life and dead are intertwined is up to us to live as fully as we can.

For me this book spoke to me in a way that very few books can. I have lived through many losses in my life, many I experienced when I was very young, The Dead of the Romantics speaks to that part of me that I keep away, because I know how hard it is to lose the ones you hold dearest, I know how that agony and pain feels that is almost impossible to describe.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn. 

There have been so many ways I have wanted to discuss this book, but I can never find the right words to adequately address this book. If I had to start somewhere it would be to say that this book is extraordinarily romantic to the point of being dangerously jaded, it is nice to know that the author has a whole education in literature that can go to her cultural background and describe in different ways the feeling of love, but this is not a competition just in order to see with how many synonyms we can describe one thing.

This is a book that touches on different genres, the most important ones apart from romance would be magical realism, fantasy and contemporary among others. It is important to make this kind of clarification, because very few times there is a general balance when there is more than one theme in play and I must say that for how short this book is it could have ended very badly if it had been longer, that said The Dead of the Romantics, seems to me the first step of something new for the author Ashley Poston. 

This book talks about so many things, but in my opinion the most important ones are: To know that it is okay not to feel good, there are so many times when we believe that we are the ones who must carry everything that seeing a literary example of how counterproductive it can be, can open the eyes of more than one and on the other hand to know that love comes in different shapes and sizes, it can come from those we love the most and at the same time from those who use it to hurt us.

The problem is that the characters are only transient in what should be their story, Benji is functional, but he is only there to function as the love interest, helping our protagonist to overcome certain problems and reminding her that love is not dead. It's not that Benji as a character isn't three-dimensional but he seems to fall by the wayside compared to our protagonist, who in this case is Flo.

Flo carries all the emotional weight of the book, she is the one you connect with and fortunately she is well written, because if Ashley Poston had failed in her character building it would have been a catastrophe, since Flo is a person who feels all her emotions and while it is true that what happens to her is emotionally strong, it is necessary to know that she is emotional and not everyone likes to be around people like her.

In the end, it's not that the book is bad (because it's not), but it's too much if the reader is not emotionally strong to endure what this book offers. This book is pretty, in the sense that all sad things are. There is beauty in melancholy and sadness, it is healthy to know when we are not well, it is okay to ask for help and if there is anyone who thinks romance is dead then they would do well to take the trouble to read this book.