A midlife dating romcom that promised more than it delivered. Read poolside in Cyprus, finished mostly out of stubbornness.
I bought Divorced Not Dead whilst we were travelling in Cyprus, somewhere between a long lunch and an even longer afternoon by a pool in Paphos. The premise was relatable. Frankie, fifty and freshly divorced, throws herself back into dating via two apps. One for love and one for another thing. It wades into a modern scene of catfishing, ghosting, kittenfishing and a whole dating vocabulary nobody warned us about. As a fifty-something woman, I was precisely the reader this book was written for. I finished the Kindle sample, bought it on the spot, and settled in to be charmed.

Readers, I was not charmed for long.

Let me be fair first, because the bones are good. An older heroine front and centre is still rarer than it should be, and there are flashes of genuine wit early on. The opening had enough spark to get my money. But the spark didn’t catch, and by the end, I was reading out of obligation rather than pleasure.

The writing got in the way

My biggest problem was the prose itself. Sentences run on and on. In many cases sixty to seventy words with barely a comma to come up for air, so you reach the full stop slightly winded and not entirely sure what you just read. The same thought often turns up twice on the same page, reworded just enough to notice. And the word “and” does an enormous amount of heavy lifting. Once you spot it, you can’t unspot it. The whole thing has the feel of a manuscript that never met a firm editor.
The dialogue compounds it. Conversations lean hard on “I said… he said… and then I said… and he said” until whole exchanges read like a school exercise book rather than a published novel. For a book trading on sharp, grown-up humour, the mechanics underneath kept tripping it up.

Swearing as a costume

Then there’s the language. I’m no prude, but the swearing in the book felt less like character and more like costume. It reads as a deliberate grab for adult, edgy, no-filter energy, and for me it had the opposite effect. It drew attention to itself instead of to Frankie. A well-placed expletive lands. Swearing used as punctuation just gets tiring.

I started skim-reading at 60%

Around the 60% mark I caught myself skimming, and once that starts it’s hard to stop. There’s a lot of rambling that doesn’t move anything forward. Pages where Frankie thinks, and thinks, and circles back to thinking. The novel slowly becomes a monologue about Frankie rather than a story happening to her.
One note that gave me pause as a mother. I have a great relationship with my adult children and step- children but the relationship between Frankie and her son didn’t sit right with me. The dynamic reads younger and chummier than most fifty-something parents of grown children would recognise, and at moments it tipped into uncomfortable.

A premise that never delivers

Here’s the real frustration. The book had a brilliant set-up. The dating jungle, the apps, the warts-and-all comedy of starting over at fifty but it never properly develops. The wild frontier the blurb promises mostly stays off the page. Instead, almost everything orbits Stef and the quilting group, and what could have been a sharp, modern look at midlife dating settles into something far smaller and more domestic. There’s nothing wrong with a quilting group, but it isn’t what I was sold.

The verdict

Divorced Not Dead had everything it needed to be my kind of book. The right heroine, the right age, the right premise, the right dry humour. Not enough of it came together. A firmer edit and a tighter focus on the dating story it kept advertising would have made all the difference. If you want a light, undemanding read,you may get on with it better than I did. For me, it promised a jungle and delivered a sewing circle.
My score: 4/10. Started strong, but lost the plot.

Have you read Divorced Not Dead? Tell me I’m being unfair in the comments. I can take it. And if you want to make up your own mind, you can grab a copy here.