Read Sarah Gerard's new age rom-com 'True Love'

Don’t let its pastel pink-and-blue cover fool you. Sarah Gerard’s new novel, “True Love,” is about as far from a standard rom-com as a book can get.

It’s acerbically funny and sharply observant, but this tale of romance among millennials is more bleak than bubbly.

The first part of “True Love” is set in St. Petersburg, to which its narrator, Nina, has returned after dropping out of college in New York City and spending eight weeks in rehab for a laundry list of addictions and self-harming behaviours.

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Various stints in therapy and rehab have made her skilful at analysing her own and other people’s emotions.

But her skills don’t yet extend to changing some of the toxic stuff in her life. She can’t quite extricate herself from her relationship with her mother, who vacillates between chilling rejection of her daughter and smarmy attempts to reconcile.

In St. Petersburg, she’s in a long-term relationship with the emotionally distant Seth, although she’s a lower priority for him than his artwork.

 Sarah Gerard.

Despite her near-obsession with Seth, Nina is constantly pursuing other men.

When Nina moves back to New York aiming to restart her writing career, Seth tags along, and Gerard gives readers an unflinching look at the grim economics of being a struggling artist of any kind.

Among other, more transient jobs, Nina works as a personal assistant to a bestselling writer, then as a bookstore manager, eventually going back to school to earn her MFA.

All the while she’s supporting Seth and living with him in a claustrophobic apartment where the only way Nina can find privacy to write is by locking herself in the bathroom.

Nina and Seth break up after she starts another relationship with Aaron, an old college friend and an aspiring screenwriter.

Nina and Aaron move into an even tinier apartment and an even more dependent relationship.

Then, in a bout of optimism, they elope.

In rom-coms, the wedding is usually the happy ending. In “True Love,” not so much.