Review of Tropesick by Lauren Okie

The premise of this novel is irresistibly cute as two writers find themselves living and writing about endless romance tropes, but the tone shift and the story's veering into poignant tragedy surprised me and felt out of synch with the beginning of the book.

Katie and Tyler were childhood neighbors and friends, on the verge of young love, then devastated, bound together, and pushed apart by a shared tragedy.

Years later, they are completely estranged. Katie is a ghostwriter for a successful romance author and Tyler is an aspiring literary fiction author in need of a paycheck when chance leads to a shocking meeting--then their pairing for an unlikely project.

Katie is well aware of the power of romance conventions and explains them to Tyler. Meanwhile, Lauren Okie playfully works every imaginable trope into both the story Katie and Tyler are writing and the situations in which they find themselves.

I loved the beginning of the book, in which the characters were fully aware of the classic romance tropes they were writing and finding themselves living within. This self-conscious, winking, meta approach felt creative and fun.

An omniscient voice continued to introduce tropes, but as the story went on, the tone became less playful and the characters and their lived tropes felt less self-referential. Ultimately a couple of giant secrets are revealed which explain both the frequency of the tropes and the puzzling circumstances surrounding Katie and Tyler. These connections and the over-the-top outlandishness of the Big Reveal seem on the surface potentially playful, which would have matched the tone of the start of the book, but they're actually tragic--and I was in for a different kind of book and ending after the fun initial setup.

I found myself frequently distracted by the audiobook narrator's often breathy, teary delivery.

I listened to an audiobook version of this title courtesy of Libro.fm and Avon.

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Lauren Okie is also the author of The Best Worst Thing.

You might also want to check out my favorite romance reads from the past year--as well as many other Bossy lists of romance gems--at this link.