Better Than The Movies, Lynn Painter, 2021
This one was a BANGER for a first light summer read—though it isn’t actually based in summer at all (but it still gives summer vibes)! We get heated banter over front yard parking spots, late night s’mores around the fire pit, memories of neighborhood picnics! And the sweetest, most playful depiction of coming-of-age first loves.
Liz and Wes have been begrudging next door neighbors all their lives; Liz being a theatrical princess in flowery dresses; Wes being the obnoxious bad boy neighbor who’d throw mud into her hair. Now, as seniors in high school, the furthest their communication ever lends itself is to fight over an empty parking spot on the curb in front of Liz’s house. UNTIL!!! Liz’s childhood neighborhood crush Michael moves back to town, and she requests Wes’s help (as Michael’s friend) to bring them together. They make a deal—he’ll bring her along to hangouts if she gives him the parking spot—and then, lo and behold, she finds Wes is the kindest, most humble and compassionate soul in their high school and all her life. And Michael—in maybe the most poignant realization of all—was just a silly girlish dream.
Let’s talk a bit about Wes.
At a beer party he and Liz attend, as the first outing of their deal, he RUNS to his car to get her a change of clothes when a drunk girl pukes on her. And since his pants are big on her and falling down on her hips, he scrunches them up in his fists to keep her from mooning anyone 🥹 like COME ON!! And in what I think is maybe the cutest bit of the scene, as soon as she comes out of the bathroom after changing her clothes, he sees her face and says “ I’m assuming you want to go?,” making absolutely no qualms about leaving his own friend’s party early because she’s uncomfortable.
He brings her shopping to buy new clothes that he thinks are more catered to what Michael likes in a girl (don’t worry guys—later he tells her that he prefers her before the makeover) and he buys her a pair of CHUCKS!
And oh my goodness, if his superb sarcasm and incredible sense of humor on top of being the most unserious and humble guy on God’s green earth doesn’t already make him your dream book boy, let me just let you know this boy has a secret area in the woods of his yard which he decorated ON HIS OWN with twinkle lights, a fire pit and chairs, and a rock pond waterfall. He said it’s his favorite spot 🥺.
And (in a scene where I actually cried), after the novel’s climax, which surrounds an argument Wes and Liz get into after Liz and Michael become a bit of a thing and Wes does with a girl named Alex, her parents tell her that when she was a kid and used to practice piano all the time, he would secretly sit on their back porch and listen to her. And the issue of the parking spot—which started it all—was false and trite, because his mother lets him park behind her in the driveway anyway.
Liz, on the other hand, maybe isn’t as likable a character on the surface—but her somewhat unattractive idiosyncrasies are what build her to be such a complex character, so the things about her which annoy me are excused.
She lost her mother (who loved romance) to a car accident while she was in the fifth grade, and, since then, she’s become an unattainable hopeless romantic. It comes off a little egocentric because it seems she expects a high school boy to fall to his knees and beg for her love, which just isn’t going to happen. Her saving grace, however, is that this is explained quite sympathetically; her mother’s memory and grief is triggered, being that she’s in her senior year and facing all the things her mother isn’t here for: graduation, first love, senior prom, dress shopping, etc. And her fondest memories with her mother, who was a rom-com screenwriter, are together watching rom-com films when Liz was a kid. So naturally she feels closer to her mother when she makes her world feel like a romantic comedy, and, more so, she has this idea that her own story should fall into that category because then at least she’d be sure her mother would approve of it. It’s actually super sad and very realistic for a young girl grieving.
She does admit that she has an “unrealistically optimistic nature,” which becomes the basis for her story arc, because although she does get her happy ending with Wes, she accepts that she’s been forcing her life into a rom-com and Michael was just an ideal; the idea of him was just that character.
The friendship between Wes and Liz had soo much life. There were a few scenes I was struck by (like I’d be if thrown into a Time Machine back to my own high school years). It was uncanny the way Lynn Painter depicts a phone call scene in which Wes and Liz talk at night over the phone. They’re talking about normal things, but it feels so intimate and anticipatory. Between dialogue, Liz does mundane things like looking up at her ceiling fan, trying her best to picture him on the other end of the phone, and leaning against her wall and pulling up the covers—all things you’d expect but really do bring back the sensory experience of being a 17 year old girl on the phone with the boy next door.
In the “Secret Area” around the fire pit, they talk well into the night about her mother’s death. This scene was perfect, because although through the rest of the novel, their chemistry and banter was completely unserious, it would realistically take an intimate, late night fire pit scene like this for two people to get to the heart of their emotions. I noted while reading that their conversation about grief is so natural; it is fluid, and it feels original and youthful and true, which can be hard to be so effective, as that conversation is written about in literature so often and can easily fall trite and clichéd.
The only cliché in the book that felt somewhat intended unironically is in a scene at the end when she sees Wes and Alex together and pretends to be searching for a penny in his yard. It gets a little cringey when she starts a metaphorical speech about the penny, saying how strange it is that we forget all about pennies and don’t even realize they’re there, meanwhile one day we realize how amazing they are and that they’ve always been there all along. Alex says something like “do you need to borrow money?” which maybe I misread, and I get that it was a funny moment, but I sorta cringed because realistically there is no way anyone would respond in that way without meaning to be funny, and it didn’t seem like she was being funny. This little dip can’t remove any points from my overall rating of the book though because in the same scene I laughed out loud as Liz walked away from Wes and Alex and awkwardly said “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” which is literally hysterical. Also, it helps that Wes confronts her later and basically says bro what was that and I know I was the penny.
I also need to add that I loved how Liz’s angst and tension with her stepmother came very clearly from a place inside her, and that she was aware of it but couldn’t help it. Her stepmother Helena tries to connect with her but she’s incredibly dismissive and rude because she’s afraid if she let Helena in on the senior-year trademarks, it would replace the space she’d wanted to leave open for her mothers absence. She comes off as a real brat, but she can’t help it, and it reads as more a self v self issue than self v Helena, which is exactly the point.
The tension with her best friend Jocelyn I think was necessary for a coming of age high school story, however it is a highly used trope. Jocelyn is upset that Liz is keeping secrets from her (about Michael and about why she doesn’t happily engage in senior activities), but (maybe this is a personal ick) this argument doesn’t make much sense to me. It feels like gaslighting, for a friend to become mad at another friend for feeling uncomfortable sharing her feelings. I really hate a “why didn’t you tell me” argument;I think in reality there may be a warranted passive-aggressive “GIRL WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME” that creates an issue for 2 minutes, but wouldn’t any good friend let that go in order to comfort the friend anyway?
Back to the highlights—I loved how after she realizes Michael isn’t as good as the dream of Michael, I’m glad he wasn’t portrayed as some jock asshole. He’s just not her same vibe, but they end up being friends anyway. And oh, when she and Wes randomly kiss for the first time, I loved how they went right back to their banter afterward without there being an awkward “what was that” in the scene. The vibes were good and chill enough that they could actually look each other in the eye. A slay.
I also loved the pop culture references, and the very authentic Gen Z humor. The characters say things like “for sure” and “bet” and “I am shook,” which are all incredibly timely. It makes sense Painter has 5 kids because I was wondering how a millennial woman would be so caught up with the young slang of 2024, lol.
AND POINTS FOR THE PLAYLIST AT THE END OF THE NOVEL! I can’t wait to listen and remember this book every time.
All in all, my favorite Rom Com writer is Emily Henry, but Lynn Painter now takes #2 spot because the enjoyment I got from this novel sits right there next to People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read. AND this is a YA set in high school, so that so easily could have been a fail for me.
Rated 5/5 on Goodreads. This is a lighthearted YA so nothing is too sad, but trigger warnings for grief.
Quotes:
He was supposed to be my fate, dammit.
I stepped out onto the deck and slid the door closed behind me. It was a chilly night, with a clear sky and a bright, high moon that lit up the town. I could see moon shadows everywhere, which were beautiful and eerie at the same time.
There was something about how soft his face was at that moment—calm and happy and licked by fireglow—that made me feel lucky I’d discovered who he’d grown into.
I was letting him go, the dream of him.
I took a big, shaky breath as those dark eyes made me so sorry for everything I’d done to get us here.
