Book Review: Tropesick
Tropesick by Lauren Okie
I was really getting into this book and I read it in about a day, but in the end, I was disappointed. First of all, I enjoy friends-to-lovers and second-chance romance, and I thought it was fun how Tropesick played with a lot of common romance tropes. Tropesick was working hard to be very meta about romance genre tropes, but this was mostly fun, because Tyler and Katie were writing a romance book together.
Katie Caruso is a ghostwriter for a well-known, mega-bestselling romance author; she loves her job and doesn’t have dreams, anymore, to write her own original novels. She’s 25 and living in New York City. This summer, she is on a tight deadline and her prior writing partner dropped out, so her agent assigns her to work with another author.
Conveniently, that person is Tyler, the one who got away and her brother’s best friend from growing up on Long Island. The problem is, she fell in love with Tyler more than once in her childhood, and he disappeared when she needed him most, after her brother Mikey, aspiring baseball star, died of an overdose.
The book is told from Tyler and Katie’s POVs, with short interludes from the book they are writing and some flashbacks to the past. In present day, Tyler sees himself as a “bad guy.” He is now sober, an aspiring literary fiction writer, and a teacher and he wants to make amends with Katie before they work together. You can tell Tyler and Katie never got over each other, but it will be up to each reader to decide if you could forgive his past actions and support Katie in giving him another chance.
As for Katie, she leaned toward avoidance and didn’t want to hear his apologies, which was frustrating, and seemed plot-driven. I do hate the miscommunication trope where the truth about the past is put off for the whole book and then it is a tense reveal once they have fallen in love again and might cause the third-act breakup. I dealt with it though, because I love the premise of two people writing a romance novel together, which is to me, fun, tension-filled, and sexy. Add the lovely Southhampton beach setting and I was all settled in for a summer romance set in the Hamptons.
Excuse Me, What?
However, the so-called twist at the end took me out. I was completely confused by the end. I have read speculative fiction, but you can’t just have a fully realistic contemporary romance and then throw in something that doesn’t make sense without warning.
Sadly, I think this final twist did not make logical sense and overall, it took away from the narrative arc of the central romance and the dynamic character development for Tyler and Katie, because it made the book lack seriousness for me. And in the book, there were some serious themes. See below (TW).
I liked the premise, characters, and writing style, but overall, the ending felt rushed, and there was a big swing (and miss) plot-wise, which left the book feeling uneven for this reader.
Critique and TW
On a serious note: TW: the book deals with alcoholism, addiction, the opioid epidemic, and death by overdose (off-page, in the past), and includes the resulting grief and family dynamics related to these issues. With that, I did not like that the title seemed to be a play on the title Dopesick, which is a nonfiction book about the opioid epidemic in America. Maybe I’m wrong and it was a play on the word lovesick.
Thank you to Avon, Harper Voyager, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
