Pardon My Em Dash Claire Ashworth Wrenfield & Co. | 2025 | 312pp
Theodora Fenn works at Palimpsest, a deliberately obscure literary magazine. She has strong opinions about punctuation and people who describe works of art as ‘content’. Dane Calloway develops AI testing infrastructure for CorpusWorks. He has strong opinions about scalability and the Roman Empire. But when Theodora and Dane are forced to share a hire car to a mid-tier conference city neither of them would have chosen, those strong opinions collide in a series of escalating misunderstandings, arguments and… passion?
Review
★★★½ A romantic comedy at war with itself, and losing.
Claire Ashworth has a crisp, dry comic voice well suited to Theodora’s particular brand of exhaustion - a woman who has spent twenty years defending the epistemic necessity of the long-form narrative, now trapped in a Kia Sorento with a man who has mapped the entire human reading experience onto a series of high-entropy concept token events. The central tension is less romantic than philosophical, which is both the novel’s greatest strength and the reason the third act runs out of steam.
Ashworth is particularly sharp on the humiliation of genre recognition. For when Theodora, who has spent her career championing fiction that resists easy categorisation, begins to suspect she’s been trapped inside a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, she grows increasingly frantic. Her countermeasures against the predictable plot beats - which escalate from subtle to baroque across the novel’s middle section - constitute the book’s funniest set-pieces, and her doomed capitulation to the inevitable is rendered with both genuine tenderness and a startling number of sexual euphemisms.
The romance itself is warm and mostly convincing, though Ashworth somewhat loses the thread when the consummation of the pair’s simmering attraction inexplicably curdles into a multi-page diatribe against the unearned cultural cachet of the Oxford comma.
Ultimately, however, this is a novel that flinches from its own best ideas, albeit with considerable charm and a deeper understanding of the mathematics of eigendecomposition and cross-entropy loss than a romantic comedy has any right to contain.
About the Author
Claire Ashworth is the author of Fine, I Like You and You Again, Apparently. She holds a masters degree in narratology from the University of Edinburgh and has a small collection of yellow hats valued at almost thirty pounds.
Who Is This Book For?
Anyone currently in a hire car with someone they are definitely not falling for.