A review by kdawn999
The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

2.0

A bit disappointing for my first novel of the new year. As I learned from the afterword, the author’s main drive in this book is to explore chains of events and emotions which preceded and stemmed from a real life tragedy in her life. I think a memoir would have been better than a novel for this exploration; then I could have forgiven certain details for being true. Instead, the author opts for a risky time jumping, perspective-shifting narrator, and I don’t see why this was necessary for the story. Or perhaps there should have been more rules and restrictions on the narrator’s omniscience. I have many ideas for how I would rewrite and recenter this novel, and I wish the author would have considered departing more from real life events to deliver a more structured tragedy. As it stands, the theme about what romance means falls pretty flat.