The Rom-Commers
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 11, 2024
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
She’s rewriting his love story. But can she rewrite her own?
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. But . . . what if that kiss is accidentally amazing? What if real life turns out to be so much . . . more real than fiction? What if the love story they’re writing breaks all Emma’s rules—and comes true?
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.
