I received an eARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
As a student studying video production in college, I really wanted to like this book, it seemed like the kind of contemporary romance I’d fall deeply for. It turns out that being a video production student who was involved with film in high school made this novel harder for me to relate to because the production part of my brain would not stop nitpicking how Mina’s club and filmmaking process worked. I wanted to be able to fall into the story and instead found myself constantly stopping to question why decisions were being made and why this film club was making things harder on themselves than necessary.
I struggled a lot with the fact that Mina is in a film club and filmmaking is an intensely collaborative process but she didn’t seem to want to collaborate with anyone but Rosie. Her brush-off of Grant because he’s viewing the film club as a fun activity instead of a life or death situation rubbed me the wrong way, especially because she states that he’s part of the club’s leadership which means that she should be welcoming his ideas and feedback as part of the collaboration of leading a high school club and as part of the filmmaking process. I sat in my multiple college film classes questioning why USC was the end-all-be-all for her when New York has great film schools as well and contemplating how Mina could even afford the realities of the unspoken costs of film school and living in LA if she needed the scholarship to afford to attend USC in general. I wanted to like this book and get invested in the romance but I didn’t find it interesting enough to get past the barrier in my brain that was yelling about the film industry and film school.
I think that at a different time in my life when I was not as fully aware of what attending an actual film school program was like, and hadn’t chosen to attend an in-state school with a less expensive program instead of pursuing a more expensive and prestigious school in LA or New York, I might have fallen in love with this book. Unfortunately, I’m currently drowning in screenwriting assignments and too deep in to fall into the dreamy mythos of film school as a creative haven where doors open automatically to outsiders if they have a prestigious enough degree.