The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

I don’t know where I first heard about today’s title, but I guarantee you that the second I heard Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a book titled Romantic Comedy I was recommending that title to my library SO. FAST!  We read and reviewed Eligible way back in our first month of blogging, and I stand by my statement that it’s my favorite Pride and Prejudice retelling.  Sittenfeld is a magnificent writer, and today’s title solidified her season pass for me.  It is no joke when I have to limit myself because the writing and the pacing are propelling me through a book!  Yes, I did take four days to read this title, but after my first hour, I knew if I wasn’t purposeful, I’d stay up until stupid dark thirty to finish it.  And that was not an option with back to school chaos looming.  

What made Romantic Comedy so bingeable?  Well, the characters and their depth, the dialogue, the snark, the nostalgia, and the reality of it, all wrapped up in an unrealistic, celebrity bow!  Sally Milz, our narrator, is a tenured comedy writer at The Night Owls (read not Saturday Night Live).  She is only a writer, and not also a cast member.  We join her in 2018 as she’s about to go in for a week of her favorite chaos – work!  Here she meets Noah Brewster, a dreamy singer-songwriter who’s close to her age, and has been a success for over a decade, and is the musical guest and the host that week.  We walk through the whole week with Sally, from pitch meetings through the after-after party and what a ride it is!  Fast-forward to July 2020, and I want to say more words about the rest of the novel, but I don’t want to spoil the fun, so I’ll leave it with Romantic Comedy is truly a romantic comedy and a really fun hang.   

In case you’re not connecting the dots here, I adored Romantic Comedy!  I’m giving it four and a half stars and rounding up.  It’s a fun plot, well executed, gorgeously, snarkily written, and I really appreciated the deep dive into TNO and the nostalgia for the days when I would stay up to watch SNL and typically flip between that and Mad Men trying to soak it all in.  (I wasn’t much older than my oldest, and that is slightly terrifying.)  The half point off is for how the relationship develops in the space created by the summer lockdowns with all the plentiful financial resources of the characters, and minimally encumbered lives.  I’m frustrated by that, while also understanding that was real life for many, just not me.  Truly, Romantic Comedy would make an amazing beach or escape read, giving you an engaging, fast-paced several hours of a really fun hang!

What is a book that you adored, but still a piece of it frustrated you in your soul?

~Nikki 

PS: If you’ve read Romantic Comedy and have theories about real celebrities Noah is modeled on, please please comment or DM us!  

Curtis Sittenfeld is a New York Times bestselling author of seven novels including, as Nikki mentioned above, Eligible, a Pride and Prejudice retelling (my favorite one!), Rodham, Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland. Her nonfiction can be found in such publications as The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Time. She has been the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories, and her short fiction has also been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Washington Post Magazine. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. However, the highlight of her career is that she has been a Jeopardy! answer not once, not twice, not thrice, but FOUR times!

Darling Readers, I too binged Romantic Comedy in some possibly unhealthy way. I loved how Sally is a late-thirties divorcee fighting her attraction to pop-star, heartthrob Noah. One of my favorite things in the entire book was the premise for one of the sketches Sally wrote for Noah’s week on The Night Owls. Entitled, “The Danny Horst Rule”, Sally was pointing out how men of middling attractiveness but high comedic skill at TNO could and did often date and marry celebrity women more attractive than they are – but that it didn’t work out/ was an unwritten rule/ that it couldn’t happen for a middling attractive woman to hook a hotter man. The backbone of the entire novel is that Noah is this heartthrob and Sally is just your basic wicked smart and funny brunette. I also loved how Sittenfeld broke up the story timeline and gave us the backstory of the characters’ lives in epistolary form. Have mercy do I love a good email chain. If there was anything that Fifty Shades of Grey taught me, it was to pay attention to the subject lines, timestamps, salutations, and sign offs when authors include them in the novels. You will find so much characterization in those few little words and characters.

I’m giving Romantic Comedy a 4.5 star review. The novel was so well-written, I was invested in every single character, Jerry is the name of Sally’s father-figure, I would recommend this gem in a heartbeat, and Sittenfeld is a season-pass author if I could ever get around to reading her backlist. I’m taking off a half point because I really don’t know if I will re-read this book, even though I could see myself re-reading it as a comforting and relaxing read where I already know what’s going to happen.

Go get’yoself a copy of this 2023 summer release!

~Ashley

PLEASE SUPPORT US WHEN YOU SHOP BY FIRST CLICKING ON THE IMAGES BELOW: