The Rom-Commers
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 11 Jun 2024
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- £5.49
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- Pre-Order
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
She's rewriting his love story. But can she rewrite her own?
Emma has big dreams, though she hasn't let herself think about them in years. Until her big break comes along: she's offered the chance to write a screenplay with none other than her hero, Charlie-freaking-Yates! And it's a rom-com! It's the dream... Until reality sets in.
Charlie is a bonafide Hollywood movie-writing legend. He's also, as it turns out, kind of a jerk. He's only writing this movie to get a Mafia movie that he actually cares about made. And that's not even the worst of it: Charlie doesn't like rom-coms because he doesn't believe in love.
But Emma's not going down without a fight. She's determined to finally make her dreams come true by helping Charlie write a kick-ass screenplay. But first she has to make him understand rom-coms... And the more she tries to teach him about love, the more real it all starts to seem.
Can Emma really write her dreams into reality? Or was it all fiction after all?
*****
PRAISE FOR NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER KATHERINE CENTER
'My perfect 10 of a book. As funny and sweet as all the very best nineties rom-coms, but with Center's signature heart-tugging depth. I wish I could erase it from my mind just to read it again for the first time. A shot of pure joy.'
EMILY HENRY, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers
'Great rollicking fun! Prepare to laugh and swoon and grin your pants off.'
HELEN HOANG, bestselling author of The Kiss Quotient
'Absolutely, unequivocally delightful!'
JODI PICOULT, #1 New York Times bestselling author
'Katherine Center writes about falling down, growing up, and finding love like nobody else.'
BRENÉ BROWN, bestselling author of Dare to Lead
'Serious Nora Ephron vibes.'
TAYLOR JENKINS REID, #1 bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
'Oh, how I love Katherine Center's writing!'
JODI PICOULT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wish You Were Here
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Center (The Bright Side of Disaster) botches a clever premise about an aspiring writer too trapped by family obligations to have a career and an established writer too trapped by his career to have a family. Emma Wheeler put her Hollywood dreams on hold to be a full-time caretaker to her father, but when her manager, whom she shares with "screenwriter's screenwriter" Charlie Yates, suggests Emma become Charlie's live-in ghostwriter to fix his appalling rom-com script, Emma gets a second chance at the career she always wanted. Unfortunately, Center has Emma rhapsodically explain rom-com tropes but doesn't deploy them effectively herself. The meet-cute is more of a meet-ugly, with Charlie calling Emma an "unproduced, underachieving, failed nobody writer off the internet." This would be fine if Charlie underwent the necessary character arc to become a worthy hero, but instead he's shoved through the standard beats of a romance novel before he's developed at all, making scenes like the one in which he carries a fainting Emma bridal-style into his home feel forced, rushed, and out of character. It doesn't help that Emma is incapable of taking no for an answer, especially when it comes to physical intimacy and Charlie's reasonable concerns about consent. Additionally, Emma's boundary-smashing, superfan approach to everyone she meets in L.A. veers from rom-com heroine awkwardness into cringeworthy nonprofessionalism that makes it tough to root for her. Readers will be better served elsewhere.
