The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose is a rivals-to-lovers romance set in the world of London’s West End theatre scene. It’s a very promising début from author Robyn Green, but although I enjoyed it overall, there are pacing and plotting issues that prevent me from giving it a higher grade, and the use of a single PoV (which seems to be the preference in pretty much every traditionally published m/m romance I’ve read over the last couple of years) doesn’t do it any favours.

Jonah Penrose is currently starring in the West End’s top musical, The Wooden Horse, and his role as Achilles has just won him the Olivier Award for best actor in a musical. It’s a dream come true and he’s riding high… until he crashes to Earth the next morning, waking with one of the worst hangovers in the history of hangovers, and remembering that his long-term boyfriend told him he’d met someone else and dumped him just the day before.

As if that isn’t bad enough, Jonah finds out later that day that among the new cast members joining the show (to replace those who have decided not to renew their contracts) is Dexter Ellis, West End star, hearthrob, vocal powerhouse and all-round golden boy – and, more importantly, the actor who originated the role of Achilles four years earlier, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe and on the pre-West End tour. Despite the snide remarks on social media accusing Jonah of ‘stealing’ the part, Jonah knows he won it fair and square and that Dexter had never intented to take the role in the West End production anyway. Still, that doesn’t stop him from worrying that Dexter’s presence in the cast signifies his intention to swoop in and steal the show – and the part.

At yoga class a few days later, Jonah can’t help checking out the new guy who has taken the mat next to him. He’s tall, blond and slender, with high cheekbones and sinfully pouty lips, and Jonah is so preoccupied that it takes him a few seconds to realise the guy he’s subtly (he hopes) ogling is bloody Dexter Ellis. Still, he says hello, saying it’s a surprise to see him there… and only then realises that Dexter is acting as though he doesn’t have a clue who Jonah is. Jonah finds that hard to believe – his face is plastered over posters and adverts and Dexter will have seen video of his performances during rehearsals. What a dickhead.

The next day is the publicity photoshoot with the new cast, and Jonah is not surprised when Dexter acts as though they’ve never met. The man rubs him completely the wrong way every time he opens his mouth, and doesn’t hold back from telling Jonah what he’s doing wrong – but when illness knocks out several cast members and Dexter agrees to step in to perform the role of Patroclus (Achilles’ lover) for a few days, the tension coming off them during the love scenes is mistaken by the audience for sexual tension, and thus is the good ship #Dexah born among fans on social media. The show’s producer, seeing an opportunity to boost ticket sales, tells Jonah and Dexter she wants them to lean into that, to be nice to each other, that a theatre romance is better than a theatre rivalry, and that it won’t hurt if people think they’re a couple. Jonah isn’t too happy (and he’s never been not nice to Dexter, even though Dexter has behaved like a total bellend towards him) but is basically guilted into going along with it.

Soon after the regular cast is back on its feet, rehearsals begin with the new cast members, which means Dexter stepping into his role as Hector and spending a lot of one-to-one rehearsal time with Jonah. As the days and weeks pass, Jonah finds himself becoming increasingly aware of Dexter’s attractiveness while at the same time berating himself for it; the man is a complete arsehole and Jonah really needs this stupid attraction to just go away. But it won’t, and as he and Dexter start working together, they settle into something approaching friendship – albeit one based on sarcasm and slightly fond insults – and Jonah begins to wonder if maybe there’s more to Dexter Ellis than meets the eye

I liked a lot about The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose. The author clearly loves the theatre world and knows how it works, and I really liked the camaraderie between the actors and the crew, the idea of a theatre ‘family’ who support each other without question. The secondary characters are really well drawn and add a lot of depth and colour to the story.

Jonah is a likeable, flawed, complex character and the author does a fabulous job of articulating his fears and insecurities while also balancing them with a necessary degree of confidence, which all feels very realistic given his profession and the fickleness of the world in which he operates. He has a lot on his plate aside from worrying about what’s going on with Dexter and at the theatre; his father has Alzheimer’s, his mother has reached the point where she can no longer care for him at home, and while Jonah does what he can to support her, he feels terribly guilty at not being able to be around to help more. The author writes about Jonah’s relationship with his father with sensitivity and poignancy; he’s obviously a great dad who loves his son a great deal – but that man has been taken away by a cruel disease, and Jonah misses him very much.

…he’d said goodbye to his dad in so many ways since his diagnosis. He’d said goodbye to the memories his father could no longer recall… He’d said goodbye to their conversations, the ones they had back on summer nights in the garden… And he said goodbye to the fit man who once competed in the dad races on field days and always won, lifting Jonah in the air and yelling in triumph…

The situation with Jonah’s mother and her worsening mental health is perhaps a little rushed, but for the most part, his relationship with his parents is integrated into the story in a believable way.

Unfortunately, the thing about the book that didn’t work all that well for me was the romance, because Dexter and Jonah’s move from being rivals to lovers is really sudden, and I had no sense of why it happens when it does, or, actually, why it happens at all. The story is told entirely from Jonah’s perspective so we don’t get into Dexter’s head, and he isn’t well-developed as a character. Some authors are really good at presenting one character through the eyes of another and showing the reader who they are without being in their PoV, but unfortunately, Ms. Green doesn’t appear to have the knack of that yet. All we really know about Dexter is that he’s gorgeous and talented and – to everyone except Jonah – utterly charming, but I couldn’t work out what Jonah saw in him beyond his looks for most of the book, especially as he behaves like a complete arsehole to Jonah for such a large part of it. Jonah doesn’t communicate a change in Dexter’s behaviour to indicate he’s falling for Jonah, so the reader doesn’t know it’s happening; when they’re just rivals, Dexter is constantly rude, condescending and antagonistic, and even once they’re hooking up, he continues to offer unsolicited critiques of Jonah’s performances. Maybe the author intends that to come across as flirty snark and banter – but it doesn’t. There are hints that there’s something more going on with Dexter than Jonah gets to see, but we don’t learn his backstory until pretty late in the book – and then it’s just dropped and never explored further.

Dexter does redeem himself somewhat near the end, when he’s there for Jonah at a very difficult time, but given the amount of baggage and trust issues these two have, their relationship isn’t given the time it needs to breathe and develop. It’s kind of ironic, given the number of contemporary romances I’ve reviewed recently that I’ve said were over-long, because this one is not long enough to enable all its key elements to be properly unpacked and explored.

I commented earlier in the review that most of the traditionally published m/m romances I’ve read lately have been single PoV, and I’ll add to that that they’ve also been more about one protagonist’s emotional journey than about the romance – which also seems to be the case with many m/f contemporaries right now, too. (As I said in my review of Dylan Morrison’s Recipe for Trouble, think “Emily Henry, but gay.”)

But the thing is, that even with my reservations about the romance, I enjoyed The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose, and will certainly read more from Robyn Green. The things the author does well – the relationships between cast and crew, the insight into the workings of West End theatre, Jonah’s relationship with his parents – are very good, and make it worth a look despite its flaws.

Note: How daft is it that a book set in the UK by a British author is only available in the UK as a US (paperback) import?