Speakeasy Dead is being marketed as a romantic comedy. It has all the ingredients to be a great screwball 1920’s comedy, including bootleggers, movie stars, fabulous clothes, and zombies. Unfortunately, the characters aren’t very sympathetic or interesting, and the romance is almost non-existent. It’s a fairly entertaining light read, but not terribly engrossing and certainly not romantic.
Screwball comedies thrive on complication, and one thing this book does very well is create a classic plot with a modern paranormal twist, in which everything the heroes try to do to fix their situation makes their situation more and more complex. Clara and Bernie are cousins from a family of witches and warlocks (the distinction involves job description, not gender). Clara makes a deal with a demon in an attempt to save the life of her crush, silent film idol Beau. Alas, she’s not sufficiently specific when she makes the deal, so Beau comes back as a zombie instead of a healed and alive human being. Meanwhile, she has to manage a dancing competition at her bar, and there are many bets involved, along with rival bootleggers and what may or may not be a zombie plague. The demon she made the deal with and his assistant are constantly on hand to mess everything up.
It’s a hard plot to explain, which is fine, because that’s what screwball comedies are all about – everything makes sense, it just keeps madly escalating until it grows from a small matter involving three people to a multi-pronged disaster involving the whole town and, potentially, the world.
The problem with the book is the people, not the plot. Clara is the ditzy ingénue who makes a lot of mistakes and then matures – but I never felt sympathetic to her. I thought she was pretty amoral all through the book, although she did get more responsible as the story went on. Bernie is a sweetie pie but he never got to come into his own. I did not care what happened to any of these people. Other characters showed up but were so poorly defined that they might as will have been represented by little stick figures, or a set of initials. They were place holders – the cute kid, the sleazy bootleggers, the scary sister…none of them even remotely felt to me like actual characters.
While the book isn’t primarily a romance, it is billed as having romantic elements, but I spent the whole book trying to figure out who would possibly end up with who. I mean that in a bad way, not a good way – there was zero chemistry between any of the characters. When the book ended I was completely baffled, and considerably grossed out by one of the pairings. There are relationships that appear out of nowhere and we have no reason to care about them, and there are relationships that just don’t make any sense. The cover and the structure of the book suggest that Clara and Bernie will get together, but they are first cousins with no romantic interest in each other at all. The romance element is absent at best and infuriating at worst.
Ever since I started Jenn Bennet’s Grim Shadows series, I’ve been hoping that The Roaring Twenties will become the Next Big Thing in romance. It’s such a fascinating time period, and remarkably similar in many way to the Regency period in terms of being a time when people were pushing the edges of social and sexual norms. Speakeasy Dead does a great job of pulling together a lot of Roaring Twenties elements and combining them with paranormal themes, but it doesn’t match the plot and scenery with well-developed characters. And I so, so, so did not want anyone in this book to date anyone else – not just anyone else in the book, but really anyone else on the planet. I was sorry the book fell flat because the premise really is very clever.
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I love the era but worry I’d inadvertently read the whole thing in a Mid-Atlantic accent (or worse, that an author might write it in a Mid-Atlantic accent), which may very well be correct but would make every story feel like a farce. Farce can be fun, here and there, but there’s so much more story to tell about that time.
That’s a bummer- I get so excited any time I see a cover model with a finger wave. I, too, crave much more 1920s in my reading diet. (Also, in my closet if I could possibly swing it.) It’s such a fascinating time period to explore, especially for women. And it definitely lends itself to downright sexy exploits.
I will definitely check out Grim Shadows, though. Does anyone happen to have any other recommendations for Roaring 20s romances?
Your review is spot on. This felt like a waste of a good setting/premise. I hated the thinly drawn characters and didn’t care what happened to them.
@Rachel
I´m looking also for Roaring 20s Romances. I read Grim Shadows and liked a lot. I have others on my tbr-Pile. Please look an amazon for the blurb of the following:
– “The Gin Lovers” by Jamie Brenner
– “Dollface” by Renee Rosen
– “It stings so sweet” by Stephanie Draven
– “Bright young things”, “Beautiful days”, “The lucky ones” by Anna Godbersen
– The Speak Easy Series by Melanie Harlow
– “Jazz Baby” by Tea Cooper
– “Jazz Baby” by Lorelie Brown
Enjoy, Silke from Germany
@ Rachel
I would also recommend Libba Bray’s Diviners series. It’s YA horror and romance set in New York. The cast of characters is fantastic (and not all of them are white!). The second book in the series comes out this summer.
Thanks for all the recs! Time for a sidecar, a silk dressing gown, and some quality reading. ; )
But… but…. I giggled all the way through it. It didn’t actually matter that the romance was weird because the premise was so intriguing and off the wall. I get bored if all my books are the same and this one was definitely a fun and fast read.