REVIEW:

There’s a particularly heinous level of hell reserved exclusively for single women in their thirties. If you’ve visited it yourself, you know. And if you haven’t, Dolly Alderton has written a book to give you a tour.

In Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean is a confident, independent, successful cookbook author. Societal pressure to couple up and lock in a baby daddy before her biological clock goes ding sends her to a dating app, where she meets her match in Max. After months of dating and his profession of love, he ghosts her. Just disappears without an explanation. Vanishes into the ether. Dropkicks her from the heaven of new love back down to the aforementioned level of hell.

Perhaps because I could relate to Nina so much, reading about her experience was PAINFUL. I had a pit in my stomach and truly felt her emotions right along with her. She also has to contend with her smug married friends (as Bridget Jones would call them), who are leaving her behind in a wake of soiled nappies and suburban lawn clippings.

Somewhat oddly, the publisher seems to be pushing Ghosts as a romantic comedy. Years from now I don’t think I’ll remember the comedy, and I certainly won’t recall any romance. But what I will for sure remember is how the author expertly captured one very specific aspect of the modern human experience.

My thanks to Knopf Doubleday and the author for providing me with a gifted copy to review via NetGalley. Ghosts is now available.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

A smart, sexy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about ex-boyfriends, imperfect parents, friends with kids, and a man who disappears the moment he says I love you.

Nina Dean is not especially bothered that she's single. She owns her own apartment, she's about to publish her second book, she has a great relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and enough friends to keep her social calendar full and her hangovers plentiful. And when she downloads a dating app, she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. Max is handsome and built like a lumberjack; he has floppy blond hair and a stable job. But more surprising than anything else, Nina and Max have chemistry. Their conversations are witty and ironic, they both hate sports, they dance together like fools, they happily dig deep into the nuances of crappy music, and they create an entire universe of private jokes and chemical bliss.

But when Max ghosts her, Nina is forced to deal with everything she's been trying so hard to ignore: her father's Alzheimer's is getting worse, and so is her mother's denial of it; her editor hates her new book idea; and her best friend from childhood is icing her out. Funny, tender, and eminently, movingly relatable, Ghosts is a whip-smart tale of relationships and modern life.