what they don't tell you about love in the movies

What They Don’t Tell You About Love in the Movie is an interesting book, mainly in that I could never quite decide how I felt about it.

Let’s start with the packaging. The cover is eye-catching. I was so excited to read this because right away it looks fun and upbeat. The formatting is clean and the editing is phenomenal. I can’t remember the last time I read a book without a single error. Not one.

The story starts off just as fun and upbeat as I expected. Kate and Joe meet at a party. They hit it off talking about their shared passion – movies. He makes them and they both consume them. In a perfect world, it should be a match made in heaven. But, their world is far from perfect. As with many would be love stories, someone falls harder than the other person. Kate is the former. She wants everything with Joe, not realizing that there is something he isn’t telling her about.

Joe has a hard time realizing what he wants – until it’s too late and the damage has been done. What he thought was right for him turns out to have been very very wrong and the person he’s become is someone that even his friends can’t respect.

The light and fluffy story that I thought I was reading, turned very quickly. That wasn’t a problem for me – not everything has to be happy all the time – but there were some things I had a hard time getting past. First, the story switched POV between Kate and Joe. I actually love stories like that. They get a bad reputation, but we get more of the story. If we had been inside Kate’s head the entire time, I may have stopped reading. I couldn’t reconcile everything she thought and did. I just wanted her to be stronger.

Joe was not a good guy, but his problems were complicated. I appreciated that. Love makes people act in ways they wouldn’t normally, so as much as I didn’t like him, I understood him somewhat – even though I thought Kate could so much better.

The most poignant point in the book came when we were in Joe’s head. I was having a hard time continuing with the story and then suddenly found myself crying. Tam, by far the best character and Joe’s best friend, said the things to him that every single reader will want to yell at some point. It was moving and completely necessary.

There is a lot of information about movies in these pages that I tended to skim. I only really cared about Joe and Kate’s story. Saying that, however, I have never seen a book done in quite this way with themed chapters and the like so I appreciate the creativity.

This is a unique book about a girl discovering that happily ever after doesn’t come just because you want it to. The characters have real and relatable problems, making the story feel life like in it’s sad truths about relationships and the perils of giving your heart away before you really know what that means.