Only Lovers in the Building is a novel that cries out for action instead of slow burn. I’m not even talking about its central romantic connection, which is decently paced and at least amusing (saving it from a D). No, I’m talking about a need for someone, somehow, to do something interesting to move the plot along. There is zero conflict going on in this book, which has a will-they-won’t-they plot that makes no real sense. It just spins its wheels. As our hero and heroine write viral book reviews that don’t go viral for any discernible reason, you wonder what the characters in the novel see that we, the readers, do not.

Liliane – Lily – Lyon’s life is officially wide open now that she’s quit her job, but she has no idea what to do with it. The decision was spontaneous, occurring during a work trip and egged on by pictures of her ex’s wedding and her general exhaustion over being ignored and stepped on. Her legal career as former Associate General Council of Ace Staffing Solutions is thus over, and the door behind her is officially closed. She decides to follow her dreams and books a room at The Icon, a legendary and very pink hotel building in Miami. She encounters her neighbor, Benedicto – Ben – Romero, a university professor and literary translator who writes poetry on the side and tends bar in its rooftop garden. She kisses him in an elevator – within minutes of meeting him.

Ben and Lily discover that they have a mutual passion for romance novels and join their building’s book club, which leads to them co-penning a variety of reviews of them on a Goodreads-like website called BookTap. When they go viral for their dual points of view reviews, they decide to unite to create a romance review podcast, which is then picked up and leads to a book deal. This is all well and good, but with Lily leaving Miami at the end of the summer, clearly this means they should ignore their chemistry and keep things professional, right?

This book falls into that newfound contemporary trap of having its protagonists be romance fans and write awesome reviews which take the world by storm and create careers for them which earn them a squeeing garden of shipping fans. If you’re going to have your characters do this, you need to create incredibly engaging reviewer voices for them and points of view that make your audience sit up and take notice, and here, this doesn’t happen at all. I liked Ben and Lily all right, in spite of Lily sounding much younger than her years, but their narrative voices don’t stand out in a way that backs up the plot’s ambitions for them.

That’s not to say that Gonzalez doesn’t have an engaging narrative drive in general; she does, which is another factor that keeps this book from being a D. As a matter of fact, the cast of characters living in the Icon are more interesting than Lily and Ben themselves – ergo causing a gigantic problem, as I wanted to spend more time with them than our main couple! Lily comes off as flighty and immature, and Ben – with his incredible pedigree – seems impossibly perfect in spite of his tattooed brooding. The romance is high on sexual combustibility but I found the ‘oh no, how can they ever get together when she doesn’t live in Miami?’ tension ridiculous in this day and age. It’s 2025, Skype is a thing and she’s literally just quit her job, and the reasons for her going home when summer ends are very few aside from family and friends – and well, don’t we all leave people behind when we start a new chapter in our lives?

That’s why I can’t quite give this a recommendation. But I do want to see what Nadine Gonzalez cooks up in the future – there’s plenty of talent here, but tha book fails to sing.