Review: "NOTHING LIKE THE MOVIES" by Lynn Painter

Hello readers!

Today I'm here to talk to you about Nothing Like the Movies, the sequel of Better Than the Movies that will come out 1st October!

Thank you so much Edelweiss and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for providing me with an arc of this book!

Title: Nothing Like the Movies

Author: Lynn Painter 

Publishing date: 1st October 2024

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers 

Pages: 448

Price: $19.99

Plot: For a few beautiful months, Wes had his dream girl: strong-willed girl-next-door Liz. But right as the two were about to set off to UCLA to start their freshman year together, tragedy struck. Wes was left dealing with the fallout, which ultimately meant losing Liz in the process. 

Flash forward months and months later and Wes and Liz find themselves in college, together. In a healthier place now, Wes knows he broke Liz’s heart when he ended things, but he is 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 the rom-com worthy big gestures she loves. Only…Liz will have none of it. Wes has to scheme like a rom-com hero to figure out how to see her. Even worse, Liz has a new friend…a guy friend. 
Still, Wes won’t give up, adapting his clever plans and going hard to get Liz’s attention and win back her affection. But after his best efforts get him nowhere, Wes is left wondering if their relationship is really over for good.

Series:
1. Better Than the Movies
2. Nothing Like the Movies 

Review:

4 stars!

If Better than the Movies is a fun and romantic book, with many references to rom-coms, Nothing Like the Movies is a more mature and sad book. There is this underlying sadness that pervades the whole story and the happiest and rom-com moments happen much later in the narrative. 

We find Liz and Wes changed from how we remembered them, two years have passed and many events have led them to be different. This is especially noticeable in Liz, who has lost a bit of her romantic nature and closed herself off. In Wes the change is less noticeable, because reading this novel I realized that I knew him very little. Thanks to his POVs, which alternate with Liz's, his character reaches a whole other depth and I almost feel like saying that he is the real protagonist of this book. 

The story focuses more on re-introducing the characters and telling us what happened to them in these two years. The events that led to their breakup have left marks on both of them and they need to be able to overcome this if they want to give each other a second chance. This brings them to spend a lot of time working on themselves and so little together. The author gives a lot of importance to these moments and their overcoming, but this leaves very little space for the romantic side of the story, which also seems a bit rushed. There are two or three funny scenes, but with this underlying sadness always present they can't leave you with a feeling of joy like the previous book. 

This is definitely a more adult novel and for this reason I also understand the ever-present sadness, because adult life sucks, but I think that many people (like me) expected a funnier and more romantic book and that's not what they will encounter. 

Nothing Like the Movies is still a good book, very smooth and enjoyable, but it fails to be unforgettable like Better Than the Movies.

- Camilla