4.25

Super cute romance with an American bubbly artiste and an Irish demi-sexual mortician.
The sex scenes were also great.

https://youtube.com/@ChanelChapters ( )

“Be more positive!”, they said, so here we go: “Morbidly Yours” wasn’t horrible! Just very bad.

30-year-old widow Lark flees her native Texas, her embittered sister-in-law Rachel, who cyber-stalks her, to Ireland to work as an animator for a local studio. She moves into a house next to the undertaker’s, our male protagonist, Callum, who is about as interesting as a dead tree in winter.

At first, the chemistry and banter between the two was great and I looked forward to lots of fun. What followed, though, was basically this:

Lark: Callum is so wonderful but I must not fall in love with him because I practically killed my husband because we had an argument and he drove recklessly around afterwards.

Callum: Lark is so wonderful but I must not fall in love with her because I need to marry someone I don’t love to keep my business from falling into the hands of a greedy corporation.

Lark: Let’s be friends with benefits, though! (I cannot emotionally handle that but somehow everything will be ok!)

Callum: Yes! (I cannot handle it either but…)

Predictably, next came some pretty nice and sensitive intimate scenes (usually I would have written “smut” but that’s the only well-written part so the latter term felt too crude).

Both Lark and Callum know communication is key and, consequently…

»Were we just going to ignore what just happened? The words were right there, resting on my tongue like a piece of hard toffee. I swallowed them down. Better left unsaid.«

With that, the vicious circle of “I love (him/her) but must not!” goes on and on and on… Mixed among all this are workplace drama, violence, a token non-binary person, whereas morbidity on the other hand is not really part of all this. Callum is supposed to be demi-sexual and/or demi-romantic (the author herself didn’t seem to be sure) but the representation here is just plain bad.

Oh, and, of course, there’s a third-act breakup so dumb I actually face-palmed.

The writing style and use of language is at high school level and the pacing varies between racing and Valium-induced creeping along.

One star out of five.

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Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam ( )