There is a particular alchemy at work in Lynn Painter’s Better Than the Movies that I find genuinely difficult to explain without resorting to the kind of effusive praise I normally reserve for Austen or Nora Ephron at her peak. And yet here we are. Published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021, the novel spent over forty months on the New York Times Young Adult Paperback Best Seller List, including two months in the number one position. That is not the trajectory of a cute little diversion. That is the trajectory of a book that found a nerve and pressed on it.
The premise is efficient in the way that all great romantic comedies are: Liz Buxbaum, a girl raised on early-2000s rom-coms in place of the mother she lost, convinces her exasperating next-door neighbor Wes Bennett to fake-date her so she can attract the attention of her childhood crush, Michael. The setup is familiar. What is not familiar is what Painter does with it. She writes teenagers as people who are actually trying to navigate grief, not just people who happen to have dead parents in their backstory for convenient emotional stakes. She treats the tropes Liz worships with the same affection and gentle skepticism that the best rom-com films bring to their own conventions. The novel is, at its core, a love letter to the genre it belongs to.
I first read Better Than the Movies in one sitting, a Saturday afternoon that evaporated so completely I missed dinner. I have reviewed hundreds of novels in my career, and I can count on one hand the number of times a book has done that to me. The experience left me with an immediate and pressing need: more. More of this voice. More of this particular brand of cinematic, self-aware, emotionally intelligent romance. More books that understand that the slow burn only works if the reader genuinely believes these two people would be terrible for anyone else.
What follows is my attempt to map that territory. I have selected seventeen books that each, in their own way, carry some essential quality of Better Than the Movies: the banter that masks something tender, the tropes deployed with full awareness, the grief or longing threaded quietly through the comedy. I have grouped them not by genre or publication date, but by the kind of reader who will find them most deeply satisfying.
For Readers Who Came for the Tropes and Stayed for the Heart
Better Than the Movies is famous for stacking every conceivable romance trope into a single narrative, and doing it with enough self-awareness that Kirkus Reviews found the approach charming rather than exhausting. The books in this section share that same gleeful trope-stacking energy, but each brings something underneath the scaffolding that keeps it from collapsing into formula.
Today Tonight Tomorrow by Rachel Lynn Solomon
This is the book I recommend first, every time, without hesitation, to any reader who loved Liz and Wes. Rachel Lynn Solomon constructed something almost impossibly elegant here: an enemies-to-lovers story compressed into a single day, the last day of high school, during which academic rivals Rowan Roth and Neil McNair are forced to compete together in a citywide scavenger hunt called Howl.
What Solomon understands, and what Painter also understands, is that enemies-to-lovers functions best not when the characters genuinely despise each other, but when they have been paying such furious, competitive attention to each other for years that falling in love is almost a foregone conclusion. Rowan has catalogued every annoying thing Neil has ever done. Neil has done the same. The intimacy in that kind of antagonism is profound, and Solomon renders it beautifully.
The novel is also quietly a meditation on the terror of endings, on what it means to leave behind the version of yourself that was defined by competition and achievement. If Better Than the Movies is about a girl who learns that real love looks nothing like the movies, Today Tonight Tomorrow is about two people who learn that the rivalry that defined them was always just another word for devotion.
The writing is sharp, the banter earns every payoff it gets, and the emotional climax is the kind that makes you put the book face-down on your chest and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes. I do not use that description lightly.
Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
Emma Lord arrived with Tweet Cute as if to prove that the social media novel could be literature, or at least very good company. The setup involves two teenagers running competing Twitter accounts for their families’ rival fast food restaurants while simultaneously falling for each other anonymously on a school messaging app, entirely unaware they are the same people they are feuding with online.
This is objectively absurd, and Lord knows it. The novel wears its You’ve Got Mail DNA proudly, right down to acknowledging it in the text. But what distinguishes Tweet Cute is Lord’s genuine understanding of how teenagers perform identity online versus who they actually are when no one is watching. Pepper, the overachiever scrambling to live up to impossible expectations, and Jack, the golden boy quietly resentful of being golden, are richly observed characters inside a frankly delightful confection of a plot.
For readers who loved Liz’s pop culture fluency and the way Better Than the Movies treats its cinematic references as a genuine emotional language, Tweet Cute offers something similar: a story in which the medium of communication is also the metaphor.
P.S. I Like You by Kasie West
Kasie West is one of the most consistent practitioners of the light, warm, thoroughly satisfying YA romance, and P.S. I Like You is among her most charming. The premise is almost painfully simple: Lily scribbles song lyrics on her school desk during chemistry class and finds, over days, that someone has written back. The anonymous exchange becomes an emotional anchor for both teenagers, and the eventual revelation of identity is handled with genuine craft.
West does not write especially complex prose. She does not need to. What she does exceptionally well is create a sense of romantic momentum so natural and unhurried that you finish her books feeling as though you have been on a very long, very pleasant walk with someone you like enormously. P.S. I Like You shares Better Than the Movies‘ commitment to the idea that earnestness is not naivety, that wanting a great love story is not embarrassing but is in fact deeply human.
For Readers Who Believe Sharp Banter Is Its Own Love Language
Wes Bennett’s particular appeal is inseparable from the quality of his verbal sparring with Liz. The books in this category are built around that same principle: that wit deployed in the service of suppressed feeling is one of the most satisfying dynamics in all of fiction. These are novels that understand conversation as foreplay, in the most literary sense of that word.
The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
The Hating Game is, in my estimation, the adult novel most frequently recommended to readers who loved Better Than the Movies, and the recommendation is entirely justified. Sally Thorne’s debut follows Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman, executive assistants to the co-CEOs of a newly merged publishing house, who have developed an elaborate system of psychological warfare to survive sharing an office. The system, naturally, is a mechanism for avoiding the obvious.
“There is a thin line between love and hate” has become such a cliché that it barely registers anymore. What Thorne does is make you feel the thinness of that line in your sternum.
The banter in The Hating Game is extraordinary, the kind of dialogue that requires a pen to read because you want to mark every exchange. Thorne has the gift, rare in romantic comedy, of making both characters genuinely funny and genuinely infuriating in equal measure. Lucy is not simply the charming one and Joshua the cold one; they are both complex, both flawed, both working hard to avoid the conclusion that seems inevitable from page one.
The novel led to a film adaptation, which is perhaps the ultimate irony to recommend to fans of a book called Better Than the Movies: the book is, in fact, considerably better than the movie.
Alex, Approximately by Jenn Bennett
Jenn Bennett is one of the quietly great architects of YA romance, and Alex, Approximately is her most accomplished novel in the genre. Bailey has moved to a California beach town and is determined to track down her online best friend, with whom she has bonded over a shared obsession with old films. The complication, which you can probably guess, is that Alex is someone she has already met and already despises: Porter, the surfer boy who works with her at the local museum and whom she has classified as the enemy.
Bennett’s You’ve Got Mail riff is richer and more emotionally ambitious than that description suggests. Bailey is a self-described “approacher” rather than an “avoider,” a character trait that becomes the novel’s central irony, since she is clearly avoiding the most obvious truth about her own feelings. The film-nerd identity she shares with the anonymous Alex mirrors Better Than the Movies‘ use of rom-com literacy as emotional shorthand. Both novels understand that the stories we love shape how we understand love itself.
The California setting is rendered with rare specificity, and the slow revelation of the central dramatic irony is engineered with something close to clockwork precision.
Betting on You by Lynn Painter
It would be incomplete to discuss the world of Better Than the Movies without noting that Lynn Painter built an entire adjacent universe populated by characters who appear across her novels in various capacities. Betting on You is among the most sheerly enjoyable of these.
Bailey works at an airport hotel, and when Charlie, a devastatingly attractive and consistently aggravating stranger, gets stranded there during a snowstorm, she does the sensible thing: avoids him entirely. The novel’s particular pleasure is that Painter never lets Charlie be conventionally wonderful. He is irritating in specific and credible ways, which makes his gradual revelation as someone worthy of Bailey’s attention feel genuinely earned rather than narratively convenient.
For readers who loved the precise calibration of Wes Bennett’s appeal, the way he was simultaneously someone Liz found infuriating and someone she could not stop watching, Betting on You offers that same calibration in a standalone package.
For Readers Who Need Their Fake Relationship to Feel Devastatingly Real
The fake dating trope works when the pretense becomes indistinguishable from the truth before either character admits it. The books in this section are united by their understanding of that principle and their commitment to making the emotional stakes of the charade feel genuinely consequential.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han
Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before requires no introduction and yet deserves a proper one. Lara Jean Song Covey keeps a hatbox filled with unsent love letters, each one a private monument to a feeling she never acted on. When the letters are mailed without her knowledge, she improvises a fake relationship with Peter Kavinsky to manage the fallout. What follows is one of the warmest, most precisely observed portraits of teenage interiority in recent American fiction.
Han writes Lara Jean with an intimacy that makes readers feel they are sitting inside her skull. The fake relationship mechanics are handled with enough specificity that the emotional confusion they generate feels entirely believable. Peter Kavinsky became a cultural phenomenon for a reason: he is written as someone whose flaws are visible and whose decency is demonstrated through action rather than declaration.
The novel shares Better Than the Movies‘ central tension: the gap between the romantic ideal and the person right in front of you. Han is simply more melancholy about the gap than Painter is, which gives the book a different emotional register without diminishing its pleasures.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
Christina Lauren is a writing duo whose work represents the apex of the mainstream romantic comedy novel, and The Unhoneymooners is their most purely pleasurable effort. Olive Torres and Ethan Thomas genuinely cannot stand each other. When the entire wedding party except for these two falls violently ill, they find themselves taking the honeymoon trip to Hawaii that was intended for Olive’s twin sister, posing as a married couple.
What Christina Lauren does here that most fake-dating narratives fail to do is maintain the genuine friction between the characters well past the point where most novels have softened it into mere misunderstanding. Olive’s animosity toward Ethan is grounded in specific incidents and real grievances. The process of revising her opinion of him is not a matter of learning he was secretly wonderful all along but of understanding why she misread him and what that misreading says about her own assumptions.
The Hawaii setting is lush without becoming postcardish, and the comedy is broad enough to be genuinely funny without tipping into farce. For readers who want Better Than the Movies‘ fake-relationship energy in an adult package with sharper edges, this is the book.
Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter
The 2024 sequel to Better Than the Movies occupies a genuinely unusual position in Painter’s catalog: she has said publicly that she does not like sequels, as a reader or as a writer, and that she resisted writing this one until reader demand and her publisher’s enthusiasm finally persuaded her. The result is something that justifies the resistance and the eventual capitulation equally.
Set during Liz and Wes’s first year of college after a devastating breakup, Nothing Like the Movies asks a harder question than its predecessor: what happens when the perfect movie ending is followed by real life, with its complications and distances and changed people? Painter’s willingness to actually damage something beautiful, rather than simply extend it, gives the sequel a melancholy depth that the first book never needed.
The second chance romance is one of the most structurally demanding subgenres in fiction, because the reader must simultaneously remember why the first romance was worth having and understand why it ended. Painter navigates this with a sureness of hand that I found genuinely impressive.
For Readers Who Want Romance That Quietly Rearranges Their Priorities
Some of the best romantic comedies are Trojan horses for something more serious. Beneath the banter and the longing and the eventual resolution, they are carrying a question about what kind of life you actually want to build. The books in this section share that quality with Better Than the Movies, which is, underneath everything, a novel about grief and the stories we tell ourselves to survive it.
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Emily Henry’s Beach Read is the novel that announced her as the dominant voice in contemporary literary romance, and it deserves every syllable of its reputation. January Andrews, a romance novelist in a crisis of faith, and Gus Everett, a literary fiction writer mired in writer’s block, end up as summer neighbors and propose a challenge: each will write the other’s genre. She will attempt a literary novel. He will attempt a romance.
The premise is almost too clever, and Henry is aware of that, so she loads the novel with enough genuine grief and professional anxiety to give the cleverness something to work against. January is processing her father’s death and the discovery that the man she idolized was not who she thought he was. Gus is carrying losses of his own. Their eventual romance is not the answer to these problems but rather the context in which they begin to face them.
Beach Read shares Better Than the Movies‘ understanding that humor and heartbreak are not opposites but neighbors, and that the best romantic comedies allow both to coexist. It is considerably more melancholy than Painter’s novel and makes no apology for it.
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
Ashley Poston’s The Seven Year Slip is one of the most elegantly constructed contemporary romances I have read in recent memory, a novel that uses a time-slip premise to do genuine emotional work rather than merely as a narrative convenience. Clementine, grieving her aunt’s death, moves into the late woman’s New York apartment and discovers it has a peculiar quality: the apartment occasionally slips seven years into the past, where she meets Iwan, a charming chef who does not yet exist in her present.
What distinguishes this from standard magical realism romance is Poston’s insistence that the fantasy elements illuminate rather than escape the emotional reality. The grief is present throughout. The question of what it means to fall in love with someone you might not be able to keep is treated seriously, not as a plot complication but as a genuine philosophical problem.
For readers who loved the way Better Than the Movies embedded real grief inside its romantic comedy architecture, The Seven Year Slip offers a similar emotional ambition with a more overtly literary sensibility.
Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Bailey
Tessa Bailey is the most reliably entertaining romance novelist working today, and Hook, Line, and Sinker, the second book in her Bellinger Sisters series, is among her most emotionally generous efforts. Fox Thornton is a fisherman who has built his entire identity around being the town charmer, the man everyone likes and no one takes seriously. Hannah Bellinger is an aspiring film scorer who has never quite figured out how to want things for herself.
What Bailey does brilliantly here is draw a direct line between emotional cowardice and romantic avoidance. Fox’s legendary charm is, when examined, a way of never being known. Hannah’s careful practicality is a way of never being disappointed. The romance is the process by which they each become more legible to themselves, which is a considerably more interesting premise than it might initially sound.
The novel rewards readers who want something a step beyond the pure confection of YA romance, while retaining every quality that makes that genre pleasurable.
For Readers Who Crave That Swoony, Cinematic Summer Feeling
Better Than the Movies has a specific temperature: warm, golden, slightly nostalgic, lit like the kind of summer afternoon that looks better in memory than it felt in the moment. The books in this section share that quality, that sense of a contained, luminous world where the emotional stakes feel enormous and the light always seems to fall at a flattering angle.
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han
Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty is one of the foundational texts of contemporary YA romance, a novel that captures the specific ache of summers that feel both infinite and already over. Isabel, known as Belly, spends every summer at the beach house belonging to her mother’s best friend, and every summer, she is in love with the family’s eldest son, Conrad.
Han writes about desire with a precision that most novelists spend careers trying to achieve. Belly’s feelings for Conrad are not tidily romantic in the way that genre conventions suggest they should be; they are messy and possessive and occasionally embarrassing, which is to say they are authentic. The novel understands that the summer romance is a particular kind of time capsule, a feeling sealed inside a season that cannot survive the autumn.
The Amazon Prime adaptation, which became its own cultural phenomenon, is genuinely good but does not replace the experience of the novel, which benefits from Han’s precise first-person interiority in ways the screen cannot replicate.
Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch
Jenna Evans Welch’s debut is a lighter confection than most of the novels on this list, and I offer that observation not as criticism but as endorsement. Love & Gelato is exactly what it presents itself as: a lush, warmhearted, Italian-set summer romance in which Lina travels to Florence after her mother’s death and discovers, through a journal her mother left behind, a version of her parent she never knew.
The grief here is quieter than in other entries on this list, and the romance is steadier. What Welch does magnificently is evoke a sense of place so specific that you finish the book slightly confused that you are not, in fact, in Tuscany. The city becomes a character in itself, which elevates the novel from pleasant summer read to something that genuinely earns its popularity.
For readers who want the warmth of Better Than the Movies without the urban edge, Love & Gelato is the recommendation I return to most often.
Mr. Wrong Number by Lynn Painter
Painter’s first adult novel, published in 2022, demonstrated that her skills scaled elegantly beyond the YA context. Mr. Wrong Number follows Olivia, who has recently lost her job, her boyfriend, and her apartment, and finds herself moving in with her brother. A misdirected text to her brother’s best friend, Colin, initiates a secret flirtation that neither of them can quite bring themselves to acknowledge when they are face to face.
The novel is essentially Better Than the Movies with more sophisticated emotional stakes. Olivia is not navigating first love but recovering from the kind of accumulated failures that require genuine self-examination, not just the courage to like someone back. The comedy is broader, the banter more seasoned, and the romantic tension is constructed with Painter’s characteristic precision.
For readers who loved Better Than the Movies and are ready to follow Painter into her adult work, this is the ideal bridge. It retains every quality that made the YA debut so irresistible while adding the complexity that comes with writing characters who have actual histories.
For Readers Drawn to the Tender Ache of Growing Up Through Romance
The final category collects books that share Better Than the Movies‘ deepest preoccupation: the use of romantic love as a vehicle for becoming more fully yourself. These are not simply love stories. They are stories about the labor of self-definition, which happens to occur in the vicinity of love.
The Do-Over by Lynn Painter
Painter’s time-loop Valentine’s Day novel is a smaller, stranger, and in certain ways more emotionally sophisticated work than Better Than the Movies. Emilie Hornbie wakes up reliving the worst Valentine’s Day of her life repeatedly: her boyfriend is cheating, her father is planning to move without consulting her, and her car has been totaled in an accident involving a classmate named Nick.
The time-loop conceit is deployed not as whimsy but as a mechanism for examining the difference between the life we are living and the life we are telling ourselves we are living. Emilie’s repeated days are opportunities to make different choices, but what Painter understands is that different choices require a different self, not just different tactics. The novel is funnier than that description implies, and the romance between Emilie and Nick is rendered with Painter’s reliable warmth.
The novel also contains what I consider some of Painter’s finest writing on grief, specifically the particular grief of a parent who has not died but has simply become unreliable.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Casey McQuiston’s debut is politically louder and emotionally brasher than anything else on this list, and I include it because its central argument is precisely the argument at the heart of Better Than the Movies: that the love story you get is almost never the one you planned for, and that is exactly the point.
Alex Claremont-Diaz, son of the first female President of the United States, is publicly forced into a truce with Prince Henry of Wales following a tabloid incident at a royal wedding. The staged friendship becomes something neither of them planned for, in a novel that is simultaneously a gleeful political fantasy and a genuinely tender exploration of what it costs to be honest about who you are.
McQuiston’s dialogue crackles. The banter between Alex and Henry is the best-constructed in contemporary romance fiction, a claim I make with full awareness of its ambition. The novel understands that wit is not merely performance but intimacy, that the willingness to be genuinely funny with someone is an act of vulnerability. In that sense, it is the most philosophically aligned book on this list with Painter’s own understanding of what romantic comedy can do when it is taken seriously.
The best romantic comedies, in any medium, are about the courage it takes to stop performing happiness and start actually pursuing it. That is the subject of Better Than the Movies, and it is the subject of everything on this list.
The seventeen novels assembled here are not interchangeable, and I want to be honest about that. Beach Read will devastate readers who come to it expecting pure confection. The Summer I Turned Pretty will frustrate readers who want narrative resolution rather than emotional authenticity. The Do-Over requires a tolerance for the kind of circular structure that some readers find maddening.
What they share is a commitment to the idea that romantic comedy is a worthy form, that its conventions are not limitations but grammar, and that working within that grammar with genuine craft can produce something that matters. Lynn Painter demonstrated this with Better Than the Movies, a novel that spent over three years on the bestseller lists not because it was the cleverest or the most original but because it was true. True to how love feels when it is complicated by grief and expectation and the inconvenient reality of the person in front of you.
These seventeen books are, each in their way, trying to be true in the same fashion. That is the only criterion I care about, and the only one worth recommending by.