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Liz Buxbaum has always known that Wes Bennett was not boyfriend material. You would think that her next-door neighbor would be a prince candidate for her romantic comedy fantasies, but Wes has only proven himself to be a pain in the butt, ever since they were little. Wes was the kid who put a frog in her Barbie Dreamhouse, the monster who hid a lawn gnome's severed head in her little homemade neighborhood book exchange.

Flash forward ten years from the Great Gnome Decapitation.

It's Liz's senior year, a time meant to be rife with milestones perfect for any big screen, and she needs Wes's help. See, Liz's forever crush, Michael, has just moved back to town, and—horribly, annoyingly—he's hitting it off with Wes. Meaning that if Liz wants Michael to finally notice her, and hopefully be her prom date, she needs Wes. He's her in.

But as Liz and Wes scheme to get Liz her magical prom moment, she's shocked to discover that she actually likes being around Wes. And as they continue to grow closer, she must reexamine everything she thought she knew about love—and rethink her own perception of what Happily Ever After should really look like.

Never did I expect for a proudly trope-laden, fictional rom-com mash-up of frenemies falling in love after a high-school crush conspiracy to make my day, but it really did. Whatever this can be attributed to–the general reader-fatigue that has plagued me for ages, the uncertain times that have sapped every bit of motivation–‘Better Than the Movies’ somehow provided that cute escape of teeanger dating angst that’s sort of a storm-in-a-teacup type of drama.

Still, Lynn Painter strikes that fine balance of capturing the mindset of young adults on the cusp of going to college, where the dialogue remains sarcastic, flowing and witty and the characters smart-arsery in full rom-com scripting flavour.

Liz Buxbaum and Wes Bennett are a couple you’d sniff from a mile away because of their obvious chemistry, though the childhood enemies vibe didn’t pull through as strongly as I thought. Instead, Wes came out (surprisingly) perceptively enlightened, cheerfully thoughtful, and almost single-mindedly devoted to Liz’s weird shenanigans. I’d hoped for his POV in fact, but Liz’s own impressions of him were enough to create a lasting imprint on him as a more than swoonworthy protagonist in this crazy plot to win over Liz’s childhood crush.

Unashamedly reminiscent of rom-coms in the past 2 decades, ‘Better Than the Movies’ also contains that gleeful bit of meta thrown in as the characters themselves live, play out those scenes (while ironically realising it too), but that just adds to the fun of it all. The long and short of it is that there’s nothing there that isn’t unexpected at all really, but that it was done with such fantastic pacing and characterisation that I could enjoy every moment of it.