the truth about movie love

Emma Wheeler studied as a screenwriter, but she’s spent the last ten years as a caregiver. After college, she had won a prestigious fellowship in Los Angeles, and her family had gone camping to celebrate her graduation and her bright future. But a rock climbing accident left her father disabled, so she changed her future. Her younger sister Sylvie was only 12, so Emma turned down her fellowship and stayed home in Texas to help her father and make sure her sister got through school.

Now it’s ten years later, and as Emma sister is graduating from college, and Hollywood is calling. Emma’s agent (and high school boyfriend) Logan calls with the chance of a lifetime. Her favorite screenwriter, Charlie Yates, known for his action movies, has written a romantic comedy. And it’s awful. He is in need of a ghostwriter to help fix the script, and Emma is the perfect choice. So Emma hands over the caregiving duties to her sister and heads out to L.A. for eight weeks of writing with an award-winning screenwriter.

She flies out, Logan picks her up at the airport, and he takes her right to the house of Charlie Yates. And Charlie takes one look a her and says no. He hadn’t known she was coming, or that Logan had told her she could stay at Yates’ house as they did the rewrite, and he turns the entire idea down. He does eventually offer Emma one night in his guest room, before she catches a flight back to Texas. She eventually agrees. And as they talk, Emma teaches Yates something he didn’t know about writing a romance.

After thinking over Emma’s ideas about romantic comedies and reading the scripts that won her the prestigious fellowship ten years before, Yates decides to ask her what’s wrong with him rom com script, a retelling of the classic It Happened One Night. Emma has pages of notes and decides that since he’d been so rude to her, she would go over them all, in detail. From page one to the ending (he doesn’t even have the lovers end up together), she rips through every piece of wooden dialogue, every romantic misstep, and every time he failed to create the magic that movie fans would be looking for before she gets on that plane to go back home.

And then something crazy happens. Yates listens to her. He takes pages of notes on what she says. And he decides he really does need her help with the script. They spend the next eight weeks together working side by side to rewrite the script while also going for drives, making dinners, swimming, babysitting Charlie’s ex-wife’s guinea pig Cuthbert, and taking line dancing lessons. Emma gets to meet people in the industry, and she talks often with her sister at home to help with her homesickness. And unexpectedly, or maybe obviously, she finds herself falling in love with Charlie.

But when they have an epic fight, followed by a medical emergency that sends Emma racing back to Texas to be with her family, she thinks that her screenwriting dreams are over for good. After everything that’s happened, will Emma be able to find her happily ever after? Or is all of those cheesy love story ideas just the stuff of movies?

The Rom-Commers is the latest rom com from the perpetual feel-good novelist whose consistency and writing ability makes her every book feel like a hug. Katherine Center has crafted another story filled with truth and compassion, pain and laughter that reminds you of comfort foods, warm blankets, and favorite nights with friends. Her love stories are not too saccharine or unrealistic. They are told about the type of people you imagine are all around you on any given day.

I am also a big fan of Nora Ephron and Nancy Myers movies and how captivating rom com films can be, so I jumped into The Rom-Commers with high expectations and a longing for laughter and love. I was not disappointed. I thought this was a fun look at the movie industry and it gives those classic rom coms the respect they deserve as masterful stories told with brilliance. This is a beautiful book, filled with heart and tears and laughs and love, and I bet it will steal your heart as it did mine.

Egalleys for the The Rom-Commers were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.