Once Upon a Bibliophile

BOOK- Nothing Like the Movies

AUTHOR- Lynn Painter

GENRE- romance, second chance at love

RATING- 4/5

MY THOUGHTS

For a few beautiful months, Wes had his dream girl. But right as the two were about to start their freshman year together, tragedy struck. West was left dealing with the fallout, wich ultimately meant losing Liz in the process.

Flash forward month later, and Wes and Liz find themselves in collage together. Wes knows he broke Liz’s heart when he ended things, but he’s determined to make her fall back in love with him. Wes knows Liz better than anyone, and he has a foolproof plan to win her back with romcom worthy grand gestures. Only…Liz will have none of it. Wes has to scheme like a romcom hero to figure out how to see her. Even worse, Liz has a new friend…a guy friend.

Still, West won’t give up, adapting his clever plans and going hard to win back her affection. But after his besy efforts lead him nowhere, Wes is left wondering whether their relationship is over for good.

…

I have to admit, when the couple I’d fallen in love with only a novel ago broke up a) off page and b) at the beginning of the book…it didn’t really look that good for Nothing Like the Movies.

The biggest problem I had with it was that it felt like the story had ended…ages ago. Wes and Liz got their happily ever after at the end of Better than the Movies. It felt like the story was being dragged -stretched- out into a duology and…I just couldn’t get behind that. There was no obvious justification for making a perfectly good standalone novel into two books.

However

Nothing Like the Movies was saved (slightly) by the fact that it was set a couple of years after Better than the Movies. Had the next book- breakup and all- happened immediately after BTTM, it would have been an absolute no from me. But quite a lot of time had passed between book one and book two- and, crucially, the breakup and the second chance at love- that it did make it worth reading. So while there was the inevitable past and baggage that Liz and Wes would bring with them back to the relationship, there was a big enough gap for the characters to have matured and changed and bring something new to the story.

And, adding to this, the setting- and subsequently the vibe of the entire novel- changed quite drastically: instead of being set in a high school in Nebraska like BTTM, Nothing Like the Movies takes place on a Californian collage campus. Now, instead of proms and fights over parking lots, Liz and Wes connect in a totally different environment- as totally different people.

One thing I loved about Nothing Like the Movies was the idea of the same themes as BTTM reoccurring, despite the stories taking place years and miles apart. The characters still struggled through feelings of grief and messy, imperfect reality of love was highlighted once again. I found something quite beautiful in that, the idea that there are some things that can transcend time or location or someone’s past to reoccur again and again. And there was something comforting in knowing that although Liz and Wes were completely different people to who they were in the prequel, they still connected through one concept: love.

I thought it was great the way that Lynn developed Liz and Wes’ own stories, creating individual journeys (almost) entirely separate from the romance: Liz was making her way in the music industry and working on a documentary, and Wes had to find a way past old hurts to succeed as pitcher for the UCLA baseball team. They might sound, if not ‘lame’, unimportant, in the grand scheme of things, but I think that adding those individual goals that weren’t really included in Better than the Movies added a lot of humanity and reality to what might otherwise have been like a fairy tale- related to real life, but with no real probability of it ever actually happening.

Nothing Like the Movies retained that swoony, romcom feeling, but it also tapped into more details about the characters lives outside the relationship. I think the dual POV helped with this a lot in letting us see both sides of the story and revealing so much more about Wes than we originally knew. In Nothing Like the Movies, Wes transformed from the hot love interest to a male lead with depth and personality beyond just being Liz’s boyfriend. And I really liked that.

However, as much as I was waxing lyrical about how a book doesn’t need to be special or groundbreaking to be a good read in my review of Better than the Movies, I did feel like the plot of NLTM was a little…mediocre. Or rather, a little classic. For, don’t get me wrong, every writing aspect was, once again, achieved to perfection. But when taken in a nutshell ( two exes meet again at collage, play baseball, fight and end up back together again¹), there’s nothing that stands out as truly unique.

And I know that last post I was all ‘sometimes simplicity works in the author’s favour, it doesn’t need to be something different or special or new’.

But that feeling wasn’t quite as strong when reading Nothing Like the Movies. Maybe because it was the second book, maybe because my brain was a tiny tiny bit bored of simple and cozy prose, but looking back on the read, I find myself wishing there was something more…different thrown in there. Because while it was a good read, I sensed something a little…cookie cutter about it.

Also, while Wes had grown in the gap between the two books, Liz had just…changed. It was repeated again and again how ‘little Liz’ had become something more, but, in truth, I missed her. And I found the new Liz insufferable.

I would have been able to bear it if the change had been slight- she’d dyed her hair or liked a new genre of music or taken up knitting. But it seemed that those two years apart from Wes had killed Liz. Because now she was a photographer. She ate salad. She wore tracksuits and watched the football. Never once did she reference a romcom, or embarrass herself in public. All the things that made her Liz, the entire concept of the first novel, had been replaced with someone…ordinary.

It just didn’t feel the same.

CONCLUSION

Nothing Like the Movies might have seemed unjustified to me at the beginning, but it truly was an amazing story- and one you shouldn’t miss. But if you’re looking for a rerun, look again, because Nothing Like the Movies is nothing like Better than the Movies.