I swooned, laughed, cried, and clapped my hands in delight over The Rom-Commers! 

 

L.A – Legendary screenwriter Charlie Yates has successfully written almost every genre – except for romantic comedy. But when his hand is forced in order to get another of his scripts produced the results are disastrous. His manager has read a draft, and it is terrible. 

 

Texas – Ten years ago, Emma Wheeler won a writing scholarship to an exclusive college, and her speciality was rom-coms. But a tragic accident on a family camping trip to celebrate her high school graduation forced her to give it all up to care for her invalid father, and younger sister. 

 

An astonishing stroke of luck sees Emma on her way to L.A to assist her favourite screenwriter of all time. She has six weeks to rewrite Charlie’s script into something unforgettable. And by doing so she may just convince Charlie that love really does exist. 

 

The Rom-Commers is my favourite by Katherine Center thus far, although I still have a few to read. I’m a sucker for a forced proximity romantic trope as well as the ordinary everyday person meeting someone famous especially someone they’ve admired, obsessed over, for years. 

 

There were so many scenes I loved between Emma and Charlie – the power-washing (I need that game in my life), the edge-of-the-cliff, the donuts, and their every interaction involving the pool and diving board. 

 

Romance aside, Emma’s tragic past, and everything her and her family had been through, and were still going through, was heart-wrenching and elevated the novel even more. Every conversation Emma had with either her father or her sister was real, raw, and heartfelt. 

 

Due to his own insecurities, because he no longer believed in love, and since he wasn’t privy to Emma’s innermost thoughts (like us readers were) meant that at times Charlie came across as kind of a jerk in regard to his treatment of Emma. It’s an outdated trope, and I understand why some readers won’t stand for it, but for me as long as he’s not an arsehole by the end of the novel I’m more forgiving. 

 

Now to the audiobook – I can’t fault the actual reading itself, but the narrator had an annoying habit of exhaling after sentences which is a pet peeve of mine with audiobooks as it’s really distracting and it’s all I can focus on. 

 

Katherine Center remains an auto-buy author for me. The thing I love most about her books is that they’re so much more than just a romance between the two leads. Well, that, and they always include happy endings for everyone. 

 

P.S. I was thrilled over Jack Stapleton making a couple of cameos, and that Hannah Brooks was mentioned (The Bodyguard is my second favourite Katherine Center).