by Katherine Center
St. Martin’s Press, 2024. 321 pages. Romance
Emma Wheeler desperately longs to be a screenwriter. She's spent her life studying, obsessing over, and writing romantic comedies--good ones! That win contests! But she's also been the sole caretaker for her kind-hearted dad, who needs full-time care. Now, when she gets a chance to re-write a script for famous screenwriter Charlie Yates--The Charlie Yates! Her personal writing god!--it's a break too big to pass up. Emma's younger sister steps in for caretaking duties, and Emma moves to L.A. for six weeks for the writing gig of a lifetime.
But what is it they say? Don't meet your heroes? Charlie Yates doesn't want to write with anyone--much less "a failed, nobody screenwriter." Worse, the romantic comedy he's written is so terrible it might actually bring on the apocalypse. Plus! He doesn't even care about the script--it's just a means to get a different one green-lit. Oh, and he thinks love is an emotional Ponzi scheme. But Emma's not going down without a fight. She will stand up for herself, and for rom-coms, and for love itself. She will convince him that love stories matter--even if she has to kiss him senseless to do it.
As much as I love an enemies-to-lovers romance, it's a tricky trope to pull off; too often authors stumble into making one or both protagonists irredeemably unlikeable. That’s never the case with The Rom-Commers, and I found myself rooting for Emma and Charlie throughout as individuals as well as a couple. Emma’s close and loving relationship with her father and sister, as well as the responsibility, pride, and resentment she feels acting as a full-time caregiver were particularly well-developed. Katherine Center always does a fine job balancing real-life struggles, cheer-worthy romance, and genuinely laugh out loud moments, and The Rom-Commers is my favorite of her books so far. She captures swoony chemistry between her characters without including explicit sexual content, making her a good choice for romance readers of all different spice preferences.
If you liked The Rom-Commers, you might also like:
Jove, 2020. 361 pages. Romance
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They're polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block. Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She'll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he'll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. But as the summer stretches on, January discovers a gaping plot hole in the story she's been telling herself about her own life, and begins to wonder what other things she might have gotten wrong, including her ideas about the man next door.
Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it's her job. But when her too-good-to-work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage's collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it's picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive Leo Vance is cast as her ne'er do well husband Nora's life will never be the same.
SGR
No comments:
Post a Comment