52 pages • 1 hour read
Lynn PainterNothing Like the Movies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “New Year’s Eve, Wes”
Content Warning: This section discusses mental health conditions (including post-traumatic stress disorder), alcohol abuse, the death of a parent, and grief.
On New Year’s Eve, Wes Bennett attends a party with his friends. It’s the first time he’s gone out since his dad, Stuart Bennett, died and he dropped out of UCLA to move home to Omaha, Nebraska. He hasn’t spent much time with his friends since his and Liz Buxbaum’s breakup either, and they haven’t been in touch. He’s shocked when she shows up at the party. Overcome by memories, Wes doesn’t know how to interact with her. He’s even more surprised when their friends make a bet about them kissing and Liz takes it. Wes dismisses himself from the group, afraid that if he and Liz interact, they’ll end up getting back together. He tells himself that ignoring her is the best decision for Liz.
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Year and a Half Later, Wes”
Wes wakes up in his UCLA dorm on the first day of classes and goes for a run. He still can’t believe that he’s back in California after everything that happened in the past two years. He thinks about how things have changed during his run and feels ready to start over. Afterward, he attends his civil engineering class, excited to be studying math and science again. After class, his roommate, AJ, invites him to play basketball. Wes declines because he wants to focus on his “educational and athletic career” and win Liz back (14).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Liz”
Liz gets up early before class and goes for a run. She listens to music and reflects on the coming year. She just got an internship with the acclaimed documentarian Lilith Grossman with the production company HEFT Entertainment. Since starting at UCLA, Liz has been working for the video production team of the athletic department. Her roommate Clark Waters helped her get the job, and she’s been enjoying it more than expected.
After working out and attending class, Liz reports to her first meeting with Lilith. Then, she goes to her office cubicle, where she and Clark talk about working with the baseball team, the Bruins. They head over to Jackie Robinson Stadium to shoot some preseason footage.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Wes”
During baseball practice, Wes and his teammates discuss a party they want to attend that weekend. Then, Coach Ross checks in with Wes about his classes. Ross let him back on the team after he dropped out, and Wes wants to impress him.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Liz”
Liz and Clark report to the stadium, where they shoot the team practicing. Liz chats with a few of the players while Clark takes videos. Everyone is still discussing the weekend party at Liz’s place and how to get tickets.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Wes”
Wes is tired by the end of his busy week. He goes to the Powell library to study, hoping that he’ll run into Liz. Later that night, he meets up with his friends before heading to the party. When they arrive, Wes is surprised that any college student could afford such an expensive apartment. He looks around the space but doesn’t see Liz like he’d hoped.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Liz”
Liz and her roommates, Clark, Leonardo, and Campbell, take shots before the party. Liz is DJing for the night. She puts on the music, and guests start to arrive. She feels uncomfortable when she learns that Wade Brooks, a guy she went on a bad date with, will be there. Then, she starts choking on her drink when she sees that Wes is in her apartment. Her heart pounds while remembering New Year’s two years ago. She can’t believe how attractive he still is and doesn’t understand why he’s back at UCLA. She steps out for some air.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Wes”
Wes discovers that Liz lives at the apartment and asks Wade where to find her. They end up all chatting in the same group. Once Liz and Wes are alone together, Wes is overcome by emotion while being in her presence again. He wants to banter with her but tries to act casual. She asks why he’s back at UCLA, and he explains that he’s restarting his freshman year and that he rejoined the baseball team. Liz asks about his mom; his sister, Sarah Bennett; and his dog, Otis. He teases her about making small talk, and she snaps, insisting that she doesn’t actually care about his life. Clark appears, interrupting them. Liz introduces Clark as her boyfriend. Wes can’t believe she’s seeing someone else.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Liz”
Liz takes Clark aside and explains why she needs him to pretend that he’s her boyfriend, informing him that Wes is her ex. Clark hesitantly agrees. Liz feels distracted for the rest of the evening, unsure of why she felt so emotional seeing Wes. Then, her friends start pestering her with questions about her alleged relationship with Clark. She insists that they’re together but that the relationship is new.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Wes”
Wes leaves the party, informing AJ that he’s heading home. While walking afterward, he thinks about Liz and Clark, still unable to believe that they’re together. Then, he calls Sarah to tell her what happened at the party. Sarah insists that Wes should tell Liz how he really feels, but Wes protests and hangs up. Realizing that he’s lost, he contacts AJ for a ride. AJ and his friends pick up Wes. In the car, his friends learn that he and Liz used to be together. Everyone pesters him with questions. He simply says that they were dating long distance and broke up because it was too hard. Then, they inform Wes that Liz works with the athletics department doing video production. Wes realizes that he’ll be seeing her all the time.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Liz”
Liz has a good forensic musicology class and feels positive walking through campus and listening to music afterward. Then, a scooter almost hits her. She’s shocked to see that it’s Wes. They talk briefly, and Liz feels her teeth clenching. Afterward, she can’t stop thinking about him and what will happen if she keeps running into him around campus.
At their next meeting, Lilith tells Liz that she’s going to be covering the baseball team’s preseason. Liz agrees to the assignment but informs Lilith that she used to date Wes. Lilith isn’t worried about the connection as long as Liz can stay professional. After the meeting, Liz tries to calm down. She tells herself that she isn’t who she used to be and that she can handle being around Wes. She also reminds herself that she can’t ruin her opportunity with Lilith.
Prologue-Chapter 10 Analysis
The opening chapters of the novel establish the parameters of the narrative world and introduce its primary conflicts, characters, and stakes. The narrative is written from the first-person points of view of the two main characters. The chapters titled with Wes Bennett’s first name are written from his perspective, while the chapters titled with Liz Buxbaum’s first name are written from her perspective. The shifts back and forth in each chapter between the protagonists’ vantage points incite narrative and formal tension. Although Wes and Liz used to date each other, they’re no longer close in the narrative present. The contrasting ways they see the world establish the theme of Balancing Expectations and Reality and its difficulties. The novel uses Wes’s and Liz’s respective discoveries that they’re back at UCLA together as the narrative’s inciting events. Once they are forced back into the same physical setting, they face emotional and personal challenges that complicate their Personal Growth and Coming-of-Age Journeys. Their alternating first-person points of view reinforce and foreshadow the internal complications that both Wes and Liz will face as they try to navigate their college lives and reconcile what they want with how things are.
The novel employs the “forced proximity” trope to heighten the narrative tension and raise the narrative stakes. As a contemporary romance novel, Nothing Like the Movies employs romantic comedy tropes to develop its explorations concerning the complications of balancing expectations and reality. The forced proximity trope arises when Liz learns that not only are she and Wes now classmates at UCLA, but Lilith also wants “to imbed [her] with the baseball team” for her new internship (83). After running into Wes at her party and then almost running into him on his scooter, Liz attempts to calm down and convince herself that it is not an issue that they’re both back at the same school. She reminds herself that UCLA is “a huge school, so the odds [are] in [her] favor that run-ins [will be] few and far between” (82). However, this internal monologue does little to assuage Liz’s mounting anxiety about being “in close proximity” to Wes again when she learns that she’ll have to spend the whole year working with his team (82). The forced proximity trope thrusts the protagonists into the same space and compels them to spend a sustained amount of time together. Liz’s new internship assignment begins to challenge her emotionally and complicate how she sees herself in the present in comparison to who she once was with Wes in the past.
The narrative allusions to the protagonists’ past lives throughout these chapters introduce the novel’s thematic exploration of the Journey Toward Healing and Forgiveness. At the start of the novel, both Liz and Wes are feeling positive about the new school year. Wes sees the fall semester as “a second chance to grab on to” everything he lost two years prior (10). He’s determined to do well academically and athletically and to reignite his and Liz’s relationship. Liz also feels the “unmarred freshness of [the] new term” (16), as she’s just starting a new internship and is excited to be pursuing her dreams in a hands-on manner. Therefore, Liz and Wes are trying to prove to themselves that they’ve changed and can move on from their pasts. Liz no longer wants to be the girl she was when she was with Wes and wants to prove herself to be an inspiring woman like Lilith, who she sees as capable of anything. Meanwhile, Wes wants to prove that he has healed from his dad’s death, his breakup with Liz, and the two years he missed at UCLA. Both of the characters are determined to grow and change. However, their internal monologues reveal that they are both compartmentalizing their pain, sorrow, and hurt in an attempt to outrun the past. In this section, the author introduces the protagonists’ overlaps in pastimes, notably listening to music and running. Music is a recurring motif throughout the novel. In these chapters, the protagonists wearing headphones emphasize how they’re each tuning out the world around them—including its complications—to imagine their future. Additionally, the author establishes running as a symbol. This represents the characters’ desires to leave their past behind and healthily process their feelings. In this way, both music and running offer the characters a reprieve from the conflicts they face externally and internally.
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