Better Than the Movies

Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter is a YA contemporary rom-com duology following hopeless romantic Liz Buxbaum and her infuriating next-door neighbour, Wes. Packed with fake dating, enemies to lovers, and slow-burn tension, it's a love letter to the romantic comedy genre.

Liz Buxbaum has watched enough rom-coms to know exactly how her perfect love story is supposed to go. Childhood crush returns to town? Grand gesture at prom? Obviously. What the script absolutely did not include was enlisting the help of Wes Bennett - the boy next door who has driven her mad since second grade - to make it happen. Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter is a YA Romance series built squarely on the language of film romance, then gently dismantled to show what real feeling actually looks like.

The series earns its devoted following not simply through its trope density - though fake dating, enemies to lovers, a love triangle, and a slow-burn romance all make appearances - but through the emotional specificity underneath. Liz's obsession with rom-coms is inseparable from her grief: losing her mother has made these stories a kind of comfort armour, and watching her reckon with that adds genuine weight to every awkward hallway encounter and carefully rehearsed line. Wes, meanwhile, is drawn with enough layered vulnerability beneath his smirking exterior that readers tend to fall for him before Liz does. Each chapter opens with a quote from a classic romantic film, a structural choice that keeps the meta-commentary on love and expectation running quietly throughout.

Witty banter and sharp dialogue are the engine of Painter's writing. Her first-person narration captures adolescent self-delusion with pinpoint accuracy - Liz is funny precisely because she's wrong about so much for so long. The coming of age arc is never played for sentimentality alone; personal growth here is embarrassing, incremental, and completely believable. The sequel shifts the setting to college and raises the emotional stakes considerably, proving the series has more on its mind than a prom-night happy ending.

Books in the Better Than the Movies series

Better Than the Movies (2021) introduces Liz Buxbaum, a hopelessly romantic high-school senior who has been measuring life against her favourite films ever since her mum passed away. When her longtime crush Michael moves back to town and Wes - tormentor since childhood, now inexplicably attractive - becomes her reluctant co-conspirator, a fake proximity scheme sets off a chain of realisation that's both funnier and more painful than anything Hollywood would script. The book established Painter as a standout voice in YA contemporary romance, accumulating hundreds of thousands of reader ratings and hitting the New York Times bestseller list.

Nothing Like the Movies (2024) follows Wes and Liz into the messier, less cinematic terrain of college life, navigating the aftermath of a breakup that left both of them changed. A second chance romance built on grand gestures collides with the inconvenient reality that Liz has moved on - or is trying to. Where the first book revelled in the pleasure of romantic clichés, this sequel complicates them, testing whether a love story can survive outside the safety of its original script. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, cementing the series as a genuine phenomenon in contemporary romance for young adults.