52 pages • 1 hour read
Lynn PainterNothing Like the Movies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: Better Than the Movies Series
Nothing Like the Movies is the second installment in Painter’s Better Than the Movies series. The first book in the series is also titled Better Than the Movies (2021). In this young adult, contemporary romance novel, the author introduces the series’ protagonists, Liz Buxbaum and Wes Bennett. In Better Than the Movies, Liz and Wes are still in high school and both living in Omaha, Nebraska with their families. At the novel’s start, Liz and Wes are not only next-door neighbors and classmates but also archenemies. The novel begins when the protagonists are “in the midst of an ongoing war over the parking space out in front of their homes. They each resort to all sorts of dirty tricks to keep the other from getting the spot” (“Review: Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter.” The Bookish Libra, 3 May 2021). This inciting narrative conflict ultimately compels the characters to interact with increased frequency. The novel is a “rom-com that features fake dating and the enemies-to-lovers trope”; Liz’s and Wes’s intersecting narratives are “also filled with perfectly placed references” to popular “rom-com films” (“Review”).
The series sequel Nothing Like the Movies picks up where Liz and Wes’s story left off. Like Better Than the Movies, Nothing Like the Movies toys with the tropes of the genre and incorporates pop culture references, using allusions to famous romantic comedies and love songs. These aspects of the Better Than the Movies novels fuel the author’s explorations of love, expectations, reality, and personal growth.
Genre Context: Contemporary Romance
Nothing Like the Movies is a contemporary romance novel. The novel also satisfies the subgenre category of romantic comedy. True to the parameters of the genre, Nothing Like the Movies is based around a central romantic relationship: Liz and Wes’s evolving intimate dynamic. The characters undergo several communication conflicts throughout the narrative. As a result, they find themselves drifting apart, only to realize that they’re meant to be together by the novel’s end. These are key facets of the romantic comedy subgenre, and Painter references parallel storylines throughout the Nothing Like the Movies narrative. These pop culture references further the novel’s more complex themes about how an individual’s expectations of romance might fail to align with the reality of her intimate relationships.
Nothing Like the Movies employs several contemporary romance tropes. The most significant is the “forced proximity” trope. Liz and Wes must spend time with each other after Liz’s new internship boss tells her that she’ll be covering Wes’s baseball team throughout the preseason. Liz must film and interview the team despite her hesitation to rekindle her former romance with Wes. Meanwhile, Wes delights in Liz’s assignment because it means that he gets to spend time in her presence.
The novel also uses the “fake dating” trope. This trope comes about when Liz asks her roommate Clark to pose as her boyfriend to put distance between her and Wes. The fake dating trope complicates Liz’s emotions and protracts her experience with the theme of Personal Growth and Coming-of-Age Journeys; this is namely because when she’s fake dating Clark, she isn’t acknowledging her true feelings.
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By Lynn Painter
