Smooth-moving and filled with banter – but also loaded with heartbreak and psychological complexity – Just Some Stupid Love Story is your traditional dramedy with a few twists. It’s a lovely ride with a punchy sense of humor but it suffers from some third act issues. That doesn’t make it a bad read; it’s just not an extraordinary one.

Molly Marks is, perhaps, the most cynical writer of romcoms in the history of the universe. Her relationships are non-starters thanks to her father’s inability to truly love fracturing her belief in romance. She stopped believing in true love a long time ago, and to some degree that’s her high school sweetheart Seth Rubenstein’s fault.

Seth, meanwhile, is a huge romantic in spite of being a divorce attorney. The two of them were utterly heartbroken in different ways when Molly broke up with him just after graduation, but he’s moved on. But the rift in their friendship never healed and their fifteen year high school reunion is the first time these former lovers have laid eyes on each other in years.

A drunken kiss leads to a terribly awkward hookup, and now Seth and Molly are stuck with feelings and emotions and romantic desires they thought were long past them. They try to stay friends with a bet between them – each of them wagers upon the success or failure of five couples they know, the last being themselves. The person who correctly guesses the largest number of correct outcomes before the next reunion will have the benefit of having the other person admit the other is right – either Molly’s belief that love isn’t real or Seth’s that it is. But five years is a very long time…

There are a couple of problems here, but at least Doyle is very realistic about Molly’s mental health and how her baggage has intervened in her life. The relationships the two analyze build fairly realistically through those five years, and every twist of fate is determined by the couples’ personalities. They’re worth rooting for, if you can get past Seth’s over-optimism and Molly’s over-negativity.

The last third of the book is where things break down a bit. Molly definitely needs to face her commitment issues, but why on earth does Seth think that his actions are a good idea? Why does he even attempt to do THAT when he knows how freaked out Molly gets about… well, I’ll leave it to the reader to discover.

And yet I truly enjoyed Just Some Stupid Love Story. It combines romance with reality in a way that generally works and makes it worth the read.