As someone who once sincerely priced out the cost of a hot-air-balloon excursion for Valentine’s Day ($800 for a one-hour ride over a vineyard in Maryland, complete with a wine-and-cheese basket), I was immediately drawn to Marcy Dermansky’s latest, Hot Air.

The cover — a Technicolor relief of a deflated balloon — is both visually enticing and a relatively good introduction to the novel, which itself is a Technicolor domestic drama. At its center is Joannie, a single mother and one-hit-wonder author who’s on a combination child/adult playdate with Johnny, the father of her daughter Lucy’s classmate and Johnny’s son, Tyson. Their date is interrupted when a hot-air balloon holding tech billionaire Jonathan Foster and his wife, Julia, crashes into Johnny’s pool.

(Jonathan just so happens to have been Joannie’s first kiss from summer camp — convenient!)

Acerbic Julia, the philanthropist half of the power couple, is bored in her marriage and bored with her husband’s failed grand romantic gesture. Naturally, she suggests that while their clothes dry and Jonathan’s assistant, Vivian, figures out how to liberate the balloon from the pool, the four have an adult playdate — complete with a partner swap.

Great! Joannie gets to live out her teenage fantasy of having the Jonathan Foster actually like and lust after her, while Julia gets to have a night with someone who isn’t her spouse, the golden-retriever-esque Johnny (with whom Joannie has only shared a relatively disappointing kiss).

Without spoiling too much of this incredibly quick ride of a plot, I can reveal that Dermansky uses her unique premise to explore some relatively weighty topics. Joannie spends much of the time lamenting her position in life and fantasizing about what it’d be like to have the Fosters’ immense wealth. Jonathan gets to play billionaire savior and faux-husband to Joannie. Childless Julia (Jonathan is shooting blanks) enjoys a kid-in-a-box mom-a-thon by virtue of offering Lucy everything she’s ever wanted (a trip to Universal Studios). Johnny, meanwhile, functions as a sex puppet who somehow manages to bore both women.

The name Hot Air is, ultimately, a titular weapon of deliberate ambiguity. Sure, the novel is ostensibly about what happens after a balloon crashes, but it’s mostly about the hot air — the meaningless words, empty actions, and growing resentment — that can suffocate romantic relationships.

What, the book seems to ask, do we owe others? Julia might answer with a hostile “Nothing,” as she tries on Joannie’s life and swiftly learns she only likes the easy parts of motherhood. Her cruelty, as well as her husband’s toward Vivian — a Vietnamese adoptee with white parents — is maybe the most interesting part of the novel. Julia, you see, very much wants to adopt a Vietnamese baby of her own.

That latter plot point is compelling, partly because Julia (like most of the others) is so deeply unlikable. I love it when people are bad just to be bad. Unfortunately, it’s also where the story stops working for me. Yes, it’s funny, smart, and sharp, but the narrative evaporates faster than the helium supporting it. Like my brief foray into considering a romantic hot-air-balloon excursion, Hot Air was more fun in theory than in practice — an idea with legs long enough to walk into the room but too thin to get very far.

Nick Havey is director of Institutional Research at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, a thriller and mystery writer, and a lover of all fiction. His work has appeared in the Compulsive Reader, Lambda Literary, and a number of peer-reviewed journals.