A review by bookstolivewith
Just Like in the Movies by Heidi Rice

emotional funny hopeful tense medium-paced

3.5

Synopsis: Ruby Graham just lost her best friend in the world — who also happened to bequeath her a half share of the movie theatre they ran together. The other half was left to his real estate developer nephew, Luke Devlin, who couldn’t care less about movies if he tried. So when the theatre turns out to be in massive debt, will Ruby be able to convince Luke to step in and help, or will her safe-haven come tumbling down around her?  

It’s a plot worthy of a Hallmark movie and I was totally on board at the beginning. Ruby, while overly optimistic and constantly at an emotional threshold, has gumption, and Luke, for all his grumpiness, obviously has a soft heart. So they’re quite lovable and they have some steamy sex scenes between them. 

BUT the writing. Or editing. Or something went wrong between conception and execution. It was a slog to get though this book, even though it should have been easy. There were scenes that just felt like same pieces of thought were just being repeated over and over for no reason other than to take up page length, or where characters seemed to have made two entirely different decisions about their lives back-to-back. Ultimately, I felt that the writing was poor. There was a lot of telling and less showing. 

I also felt like the character development was lopsided with a lot of attention and care being given to Luke’s backstory (TW: suicide, death, sexual assault/sexual encounter seen by a minor) but Ruby’s equally fraught background was only alluded to and never resolved or confronted. 

For me, this was, at best, a library read. Maybe since this was an ARC, there’s more editing to come, which I think would seriously help. The plot and characters have promise, especially if you’re a huge movie buff, but it just didn’t work as I  wanted. 
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