Katherine Center is one of my favorite authors. I have read every book she has published in the last four or five years and enjoyed each. As soon as I see that she has a book coming out, I stalk it and pray that I get to read the ARC. When the publisher decides to send me the widget, I get super excited, and I can’t download the book fast enough. That is how it played out with The Rom-Commers. I did get a little worried, though. Books I have built up in my mind have a habit of not living up to the hype. That wasn’t the case with The Rom-Commers, thankfully.
The Rom-Commer’s main storyline is centered around Emma. Emma is a socially awkward, slightly obnoxious, but sweet wanna-be screenwriter. When her father was seriously hurt and her mother was killed in a freak rock-climbing accident, Emma had to put her dreams on hold to take care of her father and sister. When her best friend offers her a job to rewrite a script for a famous screenwriter, she accepts. With her sister and father urging her, Emma sets out to LA. Once there, she is surprised that her best friend has forced her onto Charlie without warning. But when Charlie reads her revisions, he reluctantly agrees to the rewrite. The longer Emma stays with Charlie, the more she falls for him. But Charlie is a cynic. He does not believe in love. It isn’t until Emma leaves that he is forced to face his feelings.
I enjoyed The Rom-Commers. I don’t know anything about what goes into being a screenwriter, but the author did a great job of explaining it. She only went into great depth with some things, but she explained enough so I understood the basics.
I liked Emma. As I said above, she was a socially awkward, slightly obnoxious, but sweet girl. She had a whole lot of stuff dumped on her at an early age (she was in her mid-to-late teens when the accident happened). Plus, she had to almost single-handedly raise her younger sister while her father relearned to live with his disabilities. I liked that she was good at what she did and knew it.
I wasn’t a massive fan of Charlie for most of the book. He was surprised when Emma showed up with his manager out of the blue. I also get that he suffered from writer’s block, which contributed to his writing such a bad rom-com. But, everything after that, Charlie was being a jerk. The things he said about Emma were horrible (he didn’t know she overheard), and how he treated her was awful. But Charlie did redeem himself in my eyes. I’m not going into what he did, but let’s say that I was bawling my eyes out when Emma confronted him about everything.
The romance angle was slow. I felt that it was a one-step-forward/three-step-back progression. It didn’t help that Charlie didn’t believe in love and thought Emma (a rom-com addict) was ridiculous in her beliefs. There was a point in the book where I wanted to slap Charlie upside the head and shake some sense into him. But once Charlie’s Grinch heart grew three sizes too big, he realized what he had given up.
The end of The Rom-Commers felt rushed. It wasn’t my favorite ending, but it worked. I wish more attention had been paid to Charlie and Emma’s HEA. While I liked reading about everyone else, I didn’t think it was needed. It was that extra that made the ending rushed.
Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press, NetGalley, and Katherine Center for allowing me to read and review this ARC of The Rom-Commers. All opinions stated in this review are mine.