Every once in a while a debut novel arrives that feels less like a polished marketing object and more like someone finally saying the thing nobody else in the genre wanted to say out loud. Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick is that kind of book. Brooke Averick, the comedian and podcaster behind Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast, makes her fiction debut with a romance that does not promise you a tidy, witty, low-stakes flirtation. It hands you a twenty-nine-year-old preschool teacher who threw up on her crush in middle school and never fully recovered, and asks you to root for her anyway.
This is romance fiction with the panic attacks left in.
What the Book Is Actually About (Spoiler-Free)
Phoebe Berman is thirty days away from turning thirty when a letter from her eighteen-year-old self shows up in the mail. It contains a single goal: lose your virginity. Phoebe has every reason to want to. She is a hopeless romantic raised on Nicholas Sparks and Sarah Dessen, with a romance-novel collection she hides like contraband. She also has crippling intimacy anxiety, a panic disorder, and a therapist named Sandy who keeps suggesting she try doing scary things “while scared.”
Instead, Phoebe drafts a checklist. Pet a dog with a cute owner. Compliment a stranger. Get drunk and make out with someone. Go on a date with Matthew, the long-distance crush who once sat behind her in calculus class. The list is her way of turning a phobia into a project, and the novel watches her chip away at it while three potential love interests circle her life: Finn, the new fourth-grade teacher at her school; Matthew, the Hinge match turned crossword pen pal; and Jonathan, her gorgeous roommate, the friends-to-lovers question she has been avoiding for twelve years.
The Voice Is the Engine
Anyone who has heard Brooke Averick speak in podcast form will recognize Phoebe’s narrating voice immediately. It is anxious, hyper-specific, self-deprecating, list-obsessed, and reliably funny. Phoebe will pause mid-spiral to reorganize her T-shirt drawer by frequency of wear. She will rate her therapist’s mismatched bangles. She will catalogue the exact dental flossing tool she used in seventh grade before describing her gums bleeding on the bus ride to school. The interiority is dense, but Averick gives it rhythm, and the comic timing earns the heavier moments when they land.
The voice matches a four-star read rather than a perfect one. It is so dominant that the prose occasionally feels less like a constructed novel and more like a very entertaining transcript. That works in the book’s favor more often than it does not.
What This Book Gets Right
Romance fiction tends to skip the part where the heroine vomits before a date. Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick refuses to skip it. The honesty pays off in several places:
The anxiety is not cute. Phoebe’s panic shows up as sweaty palms, throat lumps, projectile reactions, and shame loops. The book treats these as real symptoms, not quirky personality traits.
The friend group feels lived in. Jonathan, Meg, Alex, and Nora read like people with their own messes rather than scenery for the protagonist.
The therapy is unromantic. Sandy is not a wise oracle. She is a woman with bangles and an orange tabby named Barbara who keeps misplacing the planner Phoebe gifted her.
The sister subplot adds real stakes. Jamie getting married at twenty-two to her high school sweetheart while Phoebe stares down thirty gives the milestone its emotional weight without ever feeling cruel.
The humor is generous, not mean. Averick is willing to make Phoebe absurd without making her ridiculous.
The list device, while clever on its own, also doubles as a structural backbone. Each chapter is dated by day count, and the countdown builds momentum without forcing artificial drama. There is also a tiny tattoo on Phoebe’s arm, an octopus solving a Rubik’s Cube, named Bev, that quietly carries the book’s actual thesis: I can do hard things, too. It is a small detail that pays off again and again.
Where the Book Stumbles
A four-star read is a four-star read, and there are places where the seams show in Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick.
The three-romantic-options setup does not quite balance. Finn arrives charged with possibility, gets a memorable introduction involving cuffed pants and visible ankle veins, and then never receives enough page time to fully justify his role as a contender. Matthew is the strongest of the three, but the long-distance setup means most of their early intimacy lives in screenshots and crossword scores, which can occasionally feel like reading someone else’s group chat. Jonathan’s storyline carries the most emotional weight, even if some of its turns will feel familiar to seasoned romance readers.
The middle of the book also drags. Phoebe’s anxiety spirals are well written in isolation, but they begin to rhyme with each other after a while, and a few checklist items get crossed off in ways that feel more like beat-hitting than scene-building. A subplot involving Meg’s drinking carries more weight than the comedic register around it can fully hold, and the novel sometimes glances at that tonal mismatch rather than sitting in it.
Pop-culture references arrive in dense clusters. Frozen water bottles, Hinge swipes, Wordle scores, Star Wars memes, Grease lyrics, GamePigeon. The specificity is part of what makes the book funny right now, but it may not age as gracefully as the romance fiction it tips its hat toward.
Who Will Actually Love This
Readers who grew up on rom-coms and quietly suspected the love interest would have noticed their sweaty palms in real life. People who keep a running mental tally of personal accomplishments just to silence the one missing thing. Fans of voice-driven contemporary romance who do not need their heroines to be effortlessly sexy. Anyone who has ever rehearsed a sentence in the car before walking into a room.
If you want a flirty, low-stakes beach read with steam on every other page, this is not that book. If you want a romance that takes mental health seriously without turning it into a Lifetime movie, it is exactly that book.
Similar Reads If You Loved This One
Books to slide next to Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick on your shelf:
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin, for the same brand of anxious, observational humor.
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, for the friends-to-lovers ache.
Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez, for panic disorder representation handled with real care.
Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry by Joya Goffney, for the list-making narrator who is trying very hard.
Funny Story by Emily Henry, for the messy chosen-family dynamics.
Female Fantasy by Iman Hariri-Kia, for the millennial dating disillusionment with bite.
Final Verdict
Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick is a debut that knows exactly which shelf it wants to sit on and then nudges it slightly to the left. Averick has not written the perfect rom-com, but she has written one that earns its laughs and its tears honestly, and that takes a real swing at the gap between the love stories we read and the dating lives we actually live. For the nervous pukers, as her dedication puts it, this one is going to feel like being seen.