CBR16 Book 39: "The Rom-Commers" by Katherine Center

Page count: 336 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 21 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

Emma Wheeler loves romantic comedies and has even won a contest with one of her screenplays. But with a father who needs around-the-clock care, and a sister to put through school, Emma's career dreams had to take a backseat. Now her agent has an amazing job opportunity for her, to work with the screenwriter she admires the most in the world, Charlie Yates. However, there is no way she can do the job remotely, she will need to stay in LA for six weeks. Emma initially tries to say no, scared that something will go wrong with her father if she leaves, and her sister has just landed a great internship.

Emma's little sister won't let her sacrifice even more for their family, though, so she resigns from the internship and spends days learning all of Emma's routines and rules for caretaking. Emma sets off for LA, only to discover that her agent may have fudged the truth a bit. It is true that Charlie Yates has written a script for a romantic comedy that is so awful it's staggering, but he has not asked for help improving it, and he certainly won't have some "nobody" come in to offer assistance. The romantic comedy script is a job he's doing so he can get one of his own dream projects funded, he thinks romance in general is overrated, and wants to send Emma packing.

Having gone to such trouble to actually get to his house (their mutual agent seems to think the best way to make this plan work is for them to live together in Charlie's massive mansion), she isn't going to give up without a fight. Emma will make the arrogant and stuck-up Charlie take back his disdain for the romantic comedy genre and after a brief trial run of working together, Charlie is forced to admit that they make a very good team, and they could manage to pull off this job without cutting any corners. Of course, the close proximity and all the time they spend together starts to develop into closeness of a different sort, but Charlie isn't one for relationships, and Emma has only a few weeks before she needs to get back home to her family. They might finish their screenplay, but how could they ever have a happy ending together?

This is my first Katherine Center novel, and I had very high expectations, since four different friends on Goodreads whose opinions I trust had rated it five stars. I listened to the audiobook for about 2/3 of the book, and Patti Murin, the narrator, does an excellent job. Even when Charlie's being a dismissive asshole, she made it possible to see his potential as a love interest. The final third I read in e-book (because I got impatient and had to see how things ended). 

This is a romance with a grumpy-sunshine trope, where Charlie is a cynic who claims not to believe in love, while Emma is a die-hard romantic who wants happy endings for everyone, even when life has dealt her pretty much nothing but bad cards. Due to her mother's tragic death when she was a teenager, she not only has had to be the caretaker for her father, but she's also more or less been a surrogate parent for her younger sister. She's extremely focused on her father's health, and passing over responsibility for that to her sister is very difficult for her.

Charlie comes off as arrogant and unpleasant at first, but in his defense, he probably wasn't expecting his agent to turn up on his doorstep with a complete stranger. Charlie is very good at what he does, but needs to learn to accept help and how to collaborate with someone. He's an intensely private person, and has had health problems in the past that he's not really shared with anyone else. Letting Emma into his home, learning to work with her and later opening up to her and being vulnerable requires work on his part. 

One of the reasons this book isn't a full five stars for me is the final act separation of the characters, which I thought dragged out too long, and also involved one of my least favourite tropes, the 'I must drive you away for your own good'. A thing I liked throughout the book, though, and especially towards the latter half, as they grow closer is Charlie doing his best to take care of Emma. While I find the previous trope I mentioned exasperating, the 'but who takes care of YOU?' trope is one of my favourites.

Having never read any Katherine Center books before, I was surprised to discover that this is a closed door romance, i.e. you don't actually get any sex scenes on the page. I don't mind a lack of spice if the rest of the book is satisfying, but I know that it can be a deal-breaker for others. 

Judging a book by its cover: I don't entirely like the art style on this cover, but at least the two characters look like they are Emma and Charlie, so that's nice. I just think that if they decided to show the faces of the characters on the cover, the features should have been clearer. This just looks blurry and it frustrates me. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read, 

CBR16 Book 33: "Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets and Advice for Living Your Best Life" by Ali Wong

Page count: 240 pages

Audio book length: 6 hrs 20 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Books Bingo: About someone you want to learn more about

I don't think I'd heard of Ali Wong before her first Netflix special, Baby Cobra. I've now seen all her stand-up specials and also enjoyed Always Be My Maybe, a fun romantic comedy she wrote and starred in with Randall Park, and famously got Keanu Reeves to star as himself. I've heard very good things about Beef, but there's just too much TV out there at the moment, and too little time (especially if I also want to have time to read and have a life). 

I got the audiobook of this in an Audible sale a while ago, and figured that if her stand-up is funny, her book would also be entertaining. She narrates it herself (her then husband, now ex narrates the afterword) and does a good job. Structuring each chapter as a letter of advice to her daughters (for them to read as adults, there is quite a lot of swearing and very graphic details about her life), Wong talks about her career, her dating life, being a woman in a male-dominated industry and a number of other topics. Her now ex-husband obviously features a lot in the various stories, and from the section he reads he seems like a nice guy, (who still acts as Wong's tour manager, as far as I can tell). 

Judging a book by its cover: Ali Wong is a good-looking lady, so I'm not sure why she wanted to look more like a wax figure on a 70s TV set than a person on the cover of her book. The sparkly dress is pretty, there's just something about the whole image that I find off-putting. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR5 Book 108. "Messy" by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Page count: 368 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Green-haired alterna-girl Max MacCormack only goes to Colby Randall, a posh Hollywood prep school, because her mother is the principal. She's full of scorn for the rich and spoiled around her, and especially loathes that her mother forces her to take part in extra curricular events like planning the spring carnival. Max needs to earn money, and her current after school job is not working out as well as she expected. When she is offered insane amounts of money to ghost write Brooke Berlin's blog, she can't afford to refuse. Now she just has to spend most of her free time with a girl she can't stand, and convincingly channel her on the internet.

Brooke Berlin, Hollywood starlet and daughter of mega superstar Brick Berlin (think Arnie, Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise rolled into one) is convinced that she's one step away from the stardom she deserves. A popular blog showing the world what an "It Girl" she is, will help launch her rising star, she just doesn't have time to write it herself. So why not hire some creative writing nerd who will be grateful for any time she gets to spend with Brooke? Unfortunately, the only serious applicant to her ad is the spiky malcontent Max, Brooke's half sister's best friend. Can this girl be trusted to help jump start Brooke's career?

Brooke and Max are forced to agree to a truce, and before long, they're spending most of their time together, after Brooke's blog becomes a roaring success. Can the two wildly different girls learn to be friends? Even when there's a cute boy in the middle?

Messy is the second novel from Go Fug Yourself goddesses Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. It's a sequel of sorts to Spoiled, where Brooke discovers that her father has a second daughter, whose mother has just died, when the girl (Max' best friend) comes to live with them in Hollywood. While Brooke was more of the antagonist in that book, here she gets to be one of the protagonists, and a very fun one at that.

The authors have admitted that when they were writing Spoiled, their model for Max was Mac from Veronica Mars. Max copes admirably with the fact that she is seen as somewhat of a freak at Colby Randall, and that her best (and pretty much only) friend is dating her brother, but her main worry is the terrible case of writer's block she suffers; not useful when she needs to write an admissions essay for a creative writing class in New York. That class is also the reason she needs to earn money. Unlike most of her classmates, Max' parents are not loaded. In fact, Max' father is unemployed, and the entire family are managing on her mother's salary. So when Brooke offers Max a ridiculous paycheck to ghost write her blog, Max forces herself to accept.

Naturally, as the two very different girls spend more time together, they start discovering that they may have more things in common than they expected. They even start approaching something close to a friendship, at least until a cute boy enters the mix. Max has been infatuated with the school quarterback for years and is so used to pining for him, that she refuses to accept her obvious  mutual attraction to Brady (real name Taylor!) Swift. Brady/Taylor is Brooke's co-star in the new edgy Nancy Drew movie (where Nancy grows up in a slum, trying to read Les Miserables by candlelight, and her father's a drug dealer - I would pay good money to see this film!).

Brooke doesn't really like Brady (he's shorter than her and quite geeky, after all) but she knows all about how romances between co-stars can help publicise a film. Max keeps insisting that she doesn't really like Brady as anything but a friend, and when Brooke really puts the moves on a boy, he's pretty powerless to resist. Normally such a love triangle can feel contrived, but as the main focus in Messy isn't the romance angle - which girl will Brady choose in the end, but rather, will Brooke and Max realise that despite their differences, they've actually become really good friends? Brady is just the device to put some tension between them, which they have to work through to come out better friends in the end.

I liked Spoiled, but it didn't amuse me as much as Messy, which had me cackling with laughter several times while reading it. The authors, as anyone who reads Go Fug Yourself will know, have a wonderful snarky wit, and their observations on celebrity culture, both real and made up for this fictional universe, are wonderful. There are so many digs at movie stars, and reality shows, and celebrity culture, and at the same time, they manage to make both Brooke and Max so very likable. If you want a light-hearted, amusing read, you could do a LOT worse than picking up this book.