Better Than the Movies

Every canon needs its gateway, and Better Than the Movies is where the desk now sends the youngest readers and the fondest rereaders alike. Lynn Painter's young-adult romcom is built as an open love letter to the genre itself (every chapter opens with a line from a classic romantic comedy, and the heroine narrates her life through their grammar) while quietly running a sturdier story underneath about grief, memory, and the difference between loving the montage and loving the person. The desk considers it the rare YA that works as both first romance and commentary track.

Liz Buxbaum is a high-school senior with a director's eye for her own life and a fixed casting decision: Michael, the childhood almost-something newly returned to town, is the romantic lead, and all that remains is blocking. The obstacle is logistical and lives next door. Wes Bennett, lifelong parking-spot rival, professional pest, the boy who has spent a decade turning her sprinklers on at strategic moments, has the social access Liz needs, and the alliance they strike is the trope in its youth division: he will engineer her proximity to Michael, and she will stop declaring war over the kerb. The reader has seen the films Liz quotes and knows the law those films obey, that the boy you scheme with outranks the boy you scheme for, and Painter plays the dramatic irony with a light, expert hand, letting Wes's steadiness accumulate in the margins while Liz storyboards the wrong romance.

What the desk admires is the mother-shaped hole in the script. Liz's romcom devotion is inheritance, her late mother's films rewatched into scripture, and the book's real business is her slow discovery that curating a mythology is not the same as being known — that her mother's genre loved mess, and the tidy movie Liz is directing has no room for the person she actually is. Wes, who knew her before the editing, is the argument.

Honest notices: this is young adult in register and content — heat is kisses, stakes are prom-adjacent, and the grief is the heaviest cargo aboard; the sprinkler warfare is documented and delightful. A sequel continues the couple honestly. Content notes for parental loss.

Who is this for? Younger readers starting their shelf, adults who want one afternoon of being seventeen with better lighting, and every romcom devotee who suspects the genre raised them. Roll credits, then read the sequel, which continues the couple past the kiss and into the harder, better material. The desk approves this franchise without reservation.