Rainbow Rowell really likes writing about writers. That's almost a tongue twister, and tongue twisters take a ton of twisting to perfect. Writing about a writer from the perspective of a writer does not. And for a woman who's supposed to be so hilarious, Georgie wasn't exactly as charming as advertised. You don't get away with saying "she said a yo mama joke, and Seth laughed," and have that qualify as funny. 
 This book was bland. 
 From the grey of the cover to all of the endless boring, prattling, not-actually-very-romantic dialogue, it was a bloody drag. 
 Don't be fooled. It's basically a YA book, but the concept wouldn't have worked as a YA book, so the characters are adults but half of the time the book's using analepsis so the characters technically could be in a YA book. It felt to me as if Rowell threw in the stuff about the difficult pregnancies and births just to stay clear of the YA tropes. 
 I'm also not a romantic person - I'm essentially romance-blind - but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it in fiction. The thing is, Neal's just sort of creepy to me. He doesn't seem endearing. I don't think drawing on somebody is cute. That would just be annoying, unless you're getting henna done, or a tattoo stencil. If you get drawn on, you just make the shower water turn a weird colour and then have splodgy skin for a while. The entire concept of the phonecalls was also unsettling in the end: even if they're married in the current timeline or whatever, it's still a 37-YEAR-OLD flirting with a 22-YEAR-OLD. I don't mind age gap relationships, but only if the people involved, you know, know each other's ages. 
 The timeline stuff felt really tacked on, anyhow. I thought it would be a revisitation of all the reasons Georgie and Neal actually got together in the first place, which would convince her to work on their marriage, but instead it was some weird time travel business, and then the ending of Love Actually. The characters weren't interesting enough for it to be character-driven, (view spoiler)[(I worked out Seth was in love with Georgie in like the first flashback scene, as I'm sure literally everyone else who's read this book did) (hide spoiler)] and the concept was a little too flimsy to sustain itself. 
 1.5 stars, for Heather, who was great, and also for pugs, which are cute and I will fight everybody on this.