• Courtesy Of Isabel Senter
• Amber Roberts

How would you like texting to be your job? What if it meant you had to keep a legal pad full of synonyms for the male member by your side at all times?

Such is the setup of Text Appeal, the debut romance novel from Vermont author Amber Roberts. Coder Lark finds herself in a pickle when an unsolicited prick pic torpedoes a work presentation and causes her to lose a sought-after Burlington tech job. Her bombastic sex therapist friend, Teagan, suggests a new income source: sexting for pay. The rest, as they say, is search history.

"Okay, color me surprised to find that the app — fittingly named Sxtra, Sxtra — wasn't half-bad, from a dev standpoint," Lark thinks to herself.

It's a fun, fresh hook for a romantic comedy, though fans of the genre will also find plenty of classic tropes to sink their teeth into. Lark, you see, has been in love with her best friend, Toby, for more than a decade, but neither of them has ever made a move. Just as things are finally heating up with him, Lark also finds herself developing feelings for an uncommonly kind client who is rapidly becoming more than a friend.

Anyone who has seen You've Got Mail might be able to guess the third-act twist just from reading the back of the book. But the fun of Text Appeal is in all the goofy, gross and occasionally geeky digital missives that Lark sends and receives along the way.

Readers' mileage may vary on whether that fun, which is largely relegated to the middle of the novel, is enough to sell them on the story. It takes several chapters for the titillating texts to start flying, chapters in which Lark reveals herself as an extraordinarily passive protagonist who doesn't do much besides complain about her coworkers and eat Ben & Jerry's. Sex work isn't even something she chooses for herself; Teagan practically pressures her into it after a series of truly belief-beggaring coincidences, most of which were, in fact, Teagan's fault.

And the ending managed to turn this reader against not only the love interest but also every other major character in the book. No spoilers here, but let's just say that the exact circumstances of that Tom Hanks-worthy twist are miles away from your classic convenient third-act misunderstanding that necessitates a dramatic breakup and even-more-dramatic makeup. Here, the hero's behavior veers into thorny questions of consent, the heroine's reaction involves taking out her anger on her loved ones in some appalling ways, and Teagan's actions include dropping the cost of a gently used 2006 Subaru Outback in an unbelievably harebrained scheme.

All of this takes a toll on the vibe, which ends up more lukewarm than romantic and more tense than comedic. Roberts' prose is light, frothy and compelling — all virtues when it comes to this genre — but Lark's voice often bogs it down. A disproportionate amount of the first-person narration is taken up by bitter asides about everyone in her life, an attitude that grows more grating the longer she refuses to make any choices that would change things.

At one point, Lark says that her "skin [is] crawling" from watching one of her fratty colleagues, Drew, eat a doughnut and "slurp" some coffee. Surely most of us can relate to hating someone so much that even their most banal actions whip us into a fury, but we also recognize such feelings as irrational. Does body positivity not extend to Drew and his doughnut? (I kid. Mostly.)

• Courtesy

• Text Appeal by Amber Roberts, Alcove Press, 336 pages. $18.99.

The many inviting elements of Text Appeal only make these problems more frustrating. The author takes a relatively nonjudgmental attitude toward sex work, treating it like any other gig economy job, and Lark's businesslike tack toward dirty talk is the source of some of the best humor in the book. The story's central pairing has a dynamic that feels authentically akin to a cozy, decade-long friendship. The male love interest is no smooth lothario or brooding antihero but a normal guy who likes comic books and Star Wars references, and Lark considers those tastes the sexiest things about him.

Finally, buried under all the complaining and the bewildering plot developments, the heroine's character arc almost manages to be a compelling portrait of a woman learning to go after what she wants, whether that's a date with her longtime crush, mind-blowing sex or a freelance coding career building websites for cam girls.

All of this is to say that this reader cannot completely write off Text Appeal. The characters, for all of their flaws, have stuck with me; for weeks, I have been telling everyone I know about Teagan the lesbian sex therapist who is so obsessed with getting her two friends together that she makes perhaps the most mind-boggling series of decisions ever committed to page.

For all the bumps in the road, the story resonated with me as a woman who was taught to feel shame around sex and desire growing up. Lark doesn't exactly go from a shrinking violet to a The Ethical Slut-toting sex goddess, but she does learn that she has the right to feel pleasure and be loved. And so Lark ultimately grew on me, in large part due to the occasional literally laugh-out-loud line such as "I'd just sent a guy a picture of an ankle for the sole purpose of wanking. A wankle pic."

A Burlington-set novel is a rare beast, and readers hoping that this one will deliver on the local flavor should temper their expectations. There are a couple of scenes set on Lake Champlain and in Waterfront Park, and in one chapter, Lark and Toby take a hike up a mountain that Roberts imagined as Mount Mansfield, according to her Instagram. But the rest of the story is lacking in Queen City specifics. A few details may even break a local reader's suspension of disbelief, such as the bachelorette party that takes place at a rooftop bar in Burlington — something that's famously impossible, as a past Seven Days story documented, unless the bride is the world's biggest fan of Istanbul Kebab House.

Those small lapses aside, a certain segment of the population will see themselves in Lark and her friends' propensity for circling through Burlington's various dive bars, eating pizza, drinking beer and crowdsourcing flirty texts. While Text Appeal isn't perfect, it's still a fun, wild, occasionally sexy read that might just have your group text in a tizzy.

From Text Appeal

After all these weeks, I'd found a solid groove between sexting, dev on the cam site, and me-time.

I could be a dozen different people in a day. Put on any (figurative) costume and play the part that was going to get me paid. Thank the goddess Ingrid Bergman for that summer I spent at theater camp, obsessed with the life of an actress (until opening night jitters set in). And thank 5G, the immortal giver of digital communication, that I could do this role-playing while hiding behind a phone. Stage fright requires a stage — better luck next time.

The freedom of downtime was new and different. I'd somehow learned how to handle a life without the last-minute weekend overtime spent fixing mistakes made by men with cars more expensive than their four years of tuition (both paid for by their fathers). This kind of independence made going back to firm life a firm "no thanks" — I quit applying for dev jobs and promised myself I'd only take an interview if it was from somewhere spectacular.