Soppy: A Love Story is a cute, snapshot-style look into the lives of a young British couple. With no overarching narrative, its goal is to capture the little everyday moments of being in love. It can be a little cheesy, but with “soppy” (UK slang for sentimental) right in the title, you can’t claim not to be forewarned, and on the whole it’s sweet and made me smile. However, it’s way too short to justify the price tag.

The unnamed characters (based on author Philippa Rice and her boyfriend Luke) move in together and experience the day-to-days of live-in love. Some of these are not terribly original or interesting (they hold hands in a movie theater; they watch a sunset). Others made me smile (they assemble IKEA furniture; she thrills at the first document addressed to the two of them, then realizes it’s a gas bill). It is less a graphic novel and more a collection of higher-quality “Love Is…” comic strips.

In addition to black and white, the book uses red ink. It’s usually interesting and effective, although sometimes the amount of red takes some getting used to (a lawn of red grass, for instance, is a bit jarring). Rice is a talented artist with a coherent art design vision throughout the work. People and things are drawn in a soft, round style. The protagonists are refreshingly ordinary in a genre dominated by muscles and boobs. The heroine is short and round, and the hero, with his shaggy haircut and skinny jeans, looks a bit like a squishy 1960s Beatlemaniac.

On the whole, I’d have given the book a B- except for one huge problem: the price. When you subtract out the title pages and the end pages, you’re left with about 100 pages of content. Some of these pages are single images, like the couple watching a sunset, or repeated images, like multiple pages showing the couple trying various configurations to fit in a bed together. Reading the whole book took me about twenty minutes. Yet it is retailing for $14.99. Given the costs of color printing, this may be an appropriate price point for the publisher, but as a consumer, it doesn’t work for me. If I pay fifteen dollars for a book, I expect to get way more than twenty minutes of reading and occasional smiles.

I liked Philippa Rice’s style, and I think I will look into following her as a webcomic artist. Her book is sweet and, if it’s occasionally bland, it’s also occasionally quite truthful. If Rice licensed just the best and most original of her strips to greeting cards or magnets, I’d definitely buy those. As for the book, well, if you see it on the remainders pile for a few bucks, it would be a cute stocking stuffer. But at this length and the price, I can’t justify it.