Heads up: I received an ARC of this book via NetGalley. Many thanks to Berkley and Olivia Dade. Zomromcom published on Aug 5, 2025. While I finished this the day of and wrote this review the day after… I absolutely forgot to post it. So um by bad, I guess.

Rating: 👍🏻

Ok so this was pretty cute. While it’s not without a few issues, I had a really great time reading Zomromcom, Olivia Dade’s latest and her first supernatural romance.

A quick synopsis

The government accidentally created zombies while trying to create a creature to keep the threat of other supernatural beings at bay, and Americans are just having to live with it. When Edie attempts to save her bro-y neighbor from an attack and ends up needing saved herself, she learns her neighbor is not in fact a young bro, but is in fact a centuries’ old vampire.

Now all they have to do is figure out why the government hasn’t rung the alarm that zombies escaped containment, all while balancing the risk of other supers and getting their brains slurped up.

No big deal.

Back to the review

Going into Zomromcom, I honestly didn’t realize just how supernatural this book would be. I did know there was a vampire neighbor from the blurb, but I figured since zombies we’d be staying on the very surface of non-human creatures since I feel like zombies are usually in a category of their own. So I was a bit surprised at just how many different supernatural species were in this book, as well as the direction of the plot.

And to be honest (and I’ll hide my head in shame here), I didn’t really love that aspect? The world Dade dreamed up was frankly so much bigger than this book’s story (which I know was intentional, given this is the first in a new interconnected series), the issue for me here became world building.

While set on earth, this book’s setting is very fantastical/magical, but with the pacing of the plot read very adventure/survival romance. So a lot of the world building ended up feeling like big chunks of being told stuff about the lore throughout—and that took me out of the story at times.

I will also say the romance itself seemed very rushed, bordering on insta-lovey. Which honestly is fine even if it’s not always for me. But in this case, Edie and Max went from butting heads to kissing with feeling very very quickly, and I personally think a slower burn would’ve suited this story better.

All of that said, I did read this book in a day and had an absolute blast. Once I decided to just go along with the ridiculousness of the world, it was a romp. You just can’t question too much about the setting here or things start to fall apart a little. 🧟