A review of Big Feelings by Amy Lovat – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

Big Feelings:
An Anti-Romantic Comedy
By Amy Lovat
Macmillan Australia
ISBN: 9781761263743, Paperback, July 2025

I don’t generally read a lot of contemporary fiction books. But I’ve been reading some difficult books with minimal plot lately and when Big Feelings arrived in my mailbox the idea of a well-plotted, fast-paced and humorous “anti-romantic comedy” was very appealing. The book pivots around the adventures of Sadie Thomas, a young, slightly neurotic, unreliable but likeable protagonist, whose first person narration and character arc drives the book. The story is definitely an easy-read, funny, lighthearted, but not lacking depth.  Sadie tells her story with an intimate self-deprecation that feels like the confessions of a good friend. She stumbles, recants, doubts and second guesses herself, but it’s all done with such quirky charm and warmth that you can’t help rooting for her.

The book opens with Sadie recounting the first time she sees Chase, a relationship that sits at the heart of the book:

That I met a hopeless romantic with marshmallow insides and we each, both coated steel, found a way to soften each other. That my hand slipped into hers and we skipped off into the sunset, or whatever happens at the end. She chases me to the airport and we kiss while my luggage sits dormant next to me. Credits roll. (2)

It’s no spoiler though to say that things don’t go quite this way. Throughout the book Sadie, a rom-com devotee who grows up on the dream of her own parents’ perfect love story, sets up what she believes to be the perfect scenario and then subverts it. This is the “anti-romantic” component and Sadie’s achilles heel as she continues to try and fail to create that kind of perfection in her life. Though romance and Sadie’s search for the perfect relationship is definitely the backbone of Big Feelings, there are many other stories. One is Sadie’s relationship with her father, a wonderful, sensitive guy who raised Sadie alone with a little help from Sadie’s very switched on aunties, Lacey and Jo. Sadie and her father are best friends, and the easy warmth of their relationship, charged by the grief of her mother’s early death, adds depth to the novel:

Dad was known as the ‘cool young dad’ in my friendship circle. When I was younger, he’d take me and my friends on bush walks and let us watch Saturday morning Rage for hours. As I grew older, he was the parent who drove us to parties, picked us up from the pub and let my drunk friends crash on the couch, in the hammock, curled up on the floor. He’d wake us up with the smell of scrambled eggs and grilled cheese cooked in the frying pan, the American way. The right way, so he claimed. (60)

Of course there is an important bookstore which Sadie all but grows up in, and an abundance of books scattered and referenced throughout the novel. Many of Sadie’s relationships revolve around a shared love of books (one love interest even has “READ” “MORE” tattooed on his knuckles). There’s also a powerful subplot around fertility which I won’t spoil, but it is woven beautifully into the love story and is handled with subtlety and compassion, bringing in a number of themes around identity, life choices and parenthood. This takes on a number of angles not just in terms of Sadie’s relationship with Chase, but also those of her cousin and longstanding friendships, working across an LGBTQI+ spectrum without ever straining the reader.

In an endearing way to try and control the more uncontrollable aspects of her life, Sadie has a habit of reducing things to lists. These often take the form of Desert Island Top 5s. This extends to relationships, films, books, places to visit (and even to Lovat’s acknowledgements). But not everything is reducible to a list and not all of the lists are static. However, the lists do make good structuring devices, and add to the ease and charm of Big Feelings, a book full of big feelings but also ease and charm.  Above all, Big Feelings is a coming of age novel. It’s a story of love and loss and what it means to live a big beautiful flawed life full of love and grief.