Better Than the Movies

“[‘Someone Like You’ by Van Morrison] came on as I went past the commons and made my way through the crowds of students clogging up the halls. My favorite thing about music—when you played it loud enough through good headphones (and I had the best)—was that it softened the edges of the world. Van Morrison’s voice made swimming upstream in the busy hallway seem like it was a scene from a movie as opposed to the royal pain that it actually was.”

This early moment in the novel shows Liz’s love for music and her penchant for using music and romance as an escape from reality. Creating her own soundtrack makes her life more romantic and comforting. She easily fits herself into the romance heroine role. The above quote embodies the novel’s tone. The story, told in first-person, has a chatty, adolescent voice, typical of YA novels.

“I watched my mom’s beloved rom-coms practically every night, using her DVD collection I’d inherited when she died. I felt closer to my mother when I watched them; it felt like a tiny piece of her was there, watching beside me. Probably because we’d watched them together So. Many. Times.”

Romantic comedies are the glue between Liz and her late mother. They allow Liz to feel her mother’s presence and love as she navigates her own love life. Fiction has become part of her reality. This quote again showcases the novel’s conversational and informal tone; Painter uses sentence fragments to create emphasis: “So. Many. Times.”

“To be honest, I hadn’t been emotionally prepared for the emptiness that seemed to accompany my senior year, the many reminders of my mom’s absence. Senior pictures, homecoming, college applications, prom, graduation; as everyone I knew got excited about those high school benchmarks, I got stress headaches because nothing felt the way I’d planned for it to feel. Everything felt…lonely.”

The hole Liz’s mother’s death has left in her life is deep and painful as she comes of age. She does not feel like she can confide in anyone about her feelings until she gets to know Wes, who helps her feel less lonely. The phrase “To be honest” aims to establish Liz as vulnerable and open. In YA novels, teen protagonists will typically have challenging experiences as Liz does here with loss and grief.