I wanted to love this book because of the cover (even though I’ve been warned about that). It was hard to get past the pity party feel for the main character. It was not as light hearted and fun as I had hoped for.

This cover and synopsis are proof that you can't judge a book by its cover. I thought that the cute couple on the cover and a promise of an uplifting love story could do no wrong and I would read this book and fall in love. Well, I wouldn't really consider this a romance as it was more of a pity party for the main character.

Nick spends the entirety of the book in flashbacks of the first time they met and dealing with the aftermath of her Ellie moving out. I wanted to feel for me because break-ups suck but he never once questioned if he was the problem. He laid the blame on her and was really spiteful towards her even when she tried to make an effort to be friends and check up on him. I didn't like his character one bit.

Ellie has a big role in the flashbacks but when it comes to present day she isn't present a lot but she is mentioned quite a bit. In a way it's like the memory of her is haunting him and this seems to be the case when he tries to go on a date and he is literally talking to an imaginary Ellie, talk about a real cockblock.

The plot was meh and didn't leave wanting to know more about these characters. I felt like the romance wasn't there and it was just more about Nick hashing out the past and trying to come to terms with the present. It didn't leave me interested.

The only thing that gave me enjoyment was the movie references.

Overall, this was not what I was expecting and it was a letdown.

The love story of Nick and Ellie has as many ups and downs as Nick's favorite movies. He is a cinema operator and lover with little ambition. He cannot truly be a partner to Ellie until he learns to love himself and find his way in life. The movie references throughout were fun and the flashbacks to the night they met sprinkled in kept the story going but it was hard to root for either of these characters. It will probably be made into a best selling rom-com movie.

Thank you to Netgalley for the free, advance copy for review.

An interesting love-ish story. The plot focuses on Nick.and his struggles to find himself and love. Overall, I enjoyed the story but I found th ed characters, who we in their late 20s, early 30s to be frustratingly immature. Overall, an interesting look inside one human's mind.

I thought the premise of this book was cute, but the execution was super not. I was expecting Hornby, but this isn’t there yet. I actually bailed on this book about halfway through because I just couldn’t get through it; it had already been a month of me trying to work through, but I felt it was very long and the protagonist was very lacking in any interesting qualities which it made it hard for me to root for him. Also, the back and forth time in time distracted me from the flow of the story and made it harder for me.

The comparisons to Nick Hornby and David Nicholls in the blurb for this book are apt. Our narrator, Nick Marcet, is a London man who has spent his adult life working as a projectionist in a cinema and watching the films he loves. He's also spent the past four years in a relationship with Ellie Brown, his first real girlfriend--a relationship that has just ended as the book begins. Over the course of this hilarious, hearbreaking, beautiful novel, Nick performs a postmortem on the night they met (also the night of Obama's election in 2008), and in present time tries to figure out what went wrong.

This is a coming-of-age novel where the protagonist is 30 years old. Watching him grow up as his life falls apart is hopeful, funny, and painful. I only wish we got a little more Ellie in the story. Since the novel is from Nick's perspective, with the exception of some brief third-person interludes (intermissions, as he calls them), we don't get enough insight into her side of their relationship. But I suppose that's not the point of the book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. I really did laugh and cry while reading it. I hope Owen Nicholls writes another book soon!

I wasn't in love with the back and forth between past and present in this book. It was a light-hearted story and I appreciated that the hero saw is own faults by the end, realizing he and his expectations were the problem. In that sense there was a satisfying resolution but I didn't get those rom-com feels or the big laughs that I wanted. It made me smile and laugh here and there but I felt like it was more about the hurdles of young relationship expectations and less about the meet-cute romance. There was a lot of good wisdom and even a few deeper moments that I think is a bit out of place marketed as a rom-com. If this were on a different shelf or had a less "rom-com" cover my expectations might have been met differently.

Thank you to NetGalley for a Kindle ARC of Love, Unscripted.

I'm not a fan of romance-y, rom-com genre books but I will read it if the premise is unusual such as Love, Unscripted, so I was excited when my request was approved.

After four years, Nick and his girlfriend, Ellie, have broken up. He is devastated.

As the rest of his life semi-unravels, Nick must put the pieces of his life back and find a way back to himself to truly understand why he and Ellie were not meant for each other.

I liked that Love, Unscripted, was an unconventional love story told from the male perspective, recounting the details of a breakup in the present and traveling into the past to detail the night he and Ellie first met.

But, it was hard to like Nick; yes, he was a nice nice, sensitive guy, but meek, mild, lacking substance, ambition, and interesting qualities.

He spends most of his time comparing moments of his life to scenes in classic films (which I found amusing but became redundant fast).

I had a difficult time believing Nick and Ellie connected and how they managed to stay together for nearly four years. It seems the only thing they had in common was their love of movies, and most people enjoy movies.

I did understand Nick when he said he was never good enough for Ellie (she's ambitious, talented, beautiful), and it was this lack of self esteem that caused the end of their relationship. This dichotomy does exist in real relationships but since this is a book, I wished Nick had focused on rectifying this inequality and did something about it.

I appreciated Nick's revelation at the end that he was the reason he and Ellie ended, not her, that he should have invested time and energy into them, not throw in the towel because he assumed they were headed that way.

I wished Nick had stood up for himself, and for Ellie, who came off as your typical manic pixie girl, which was so stereotypical, down to her dyed hair.

The writing was good, but the character development could have been stronger.

Nick's a nice guy, but that wasn't enough.

I really loved the synopsis of this book, but unfortunately I found it really hard to get into. The book starts off very slow and confusing between present day and 2008. I wanted to give this story a chance, but just could not seem to get into it.

I really wanted to enjoy this book, the cover made it seem like it would be something I would enjoy, but I just could not get into this book. It was very slow, the jumping back and forth to 2008 in the beginning threw off the momentum for me.

Ellie had the quizzical eyebrows of Broadcast News-era Holly Hunter and the neon-red hair of Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At least, that's what caught Nick's attention when he met her on the night of 2008's historic election. A cinema devotee and lover of great love stories, Nick always fancied himself the Tom Hanks of his own romantic comedy, and when sparks flew with Ellie that night, he swiftly cast her as the Meg Ryan of his story. For four blissful years, Nick loved Ellie as much as he loved his job as a film projectionist: wholly, earnestly, cinematically.

But now Ellie has moved out, convinced "the fire's gone," and Nick is forced to sift through his memories to figure out where it all went wrong. The fallout from Ellie's declaration that she "doesn't love Nick the way she used to" throws him back into recollections of their first night together. Their shared jokes, her wry smile, the "hope" that filled the night air--his memories are as rose-colored as the Hollywood love stories he idealizes.

That night was a perfect meet-cute, yes, but was their romance as destined for a "happily ever after" as he'd thought? Is he really the rom-com hero he believes he's been? Or did this Harry let his Sally down? Peppered with references to beloved movies, Love, Unscripted explores how even a hopeless romantic can learn that in real life, love isn't, and shouldn't be, like what we see in the movies.



I DNF this book, unfortunately the book lacked some sort of chemistry or flow for me, and I couldn't get into it the way I hoped.

Unfortunately the author's writing style made it hard for me to get into a good reading flow. That's why I struggled with the book and unfortunately didn't enjoy it. As per my rule to only publish reviews of books three stars or higher, I will not publish a review on the book on amazon and other retailers.

Btw, the cover of the book is gorgeous and will hopefully draw many readers to the book.

Thanks for giving me the chance to review this book.

This book was every emotionally unavailable guy that realizes he screwed up by his own undoing on the perfect girl. It reminded me of the movies Ruby Sparks and 500 Days of Summer.

The male lead is every guy that projects a unrealistic expectation on a girl and cannot face reality. I liked that he did look back and realize that he is the problem and the only reason their relationship ended was because of him. Prime example of guys you don't want to date but overall, It was very refreshing to see the male POV and how he goes through the motions of a relationship and coming to terms with his own issues.

I was excited to try this book. While I loved the plot, the back and forth of timelines was a bit too much for me. Like others have expressed, it was a bit messy for the flow of the story. Overall, it was cute.

This was my first book by this author, It was pretty enjoyable. I would give this book a 3.5 star rating! It was a pretty Quick and easy read!

'Love, Unscripted’ by Owen Nicholls is a uniquely laid out story about a perfect meet-cute between Nick, a projectionist, and Ellie, a free-spirited photographer, and everything that follows after it. The novel is told from Nick’s perspective, as he’s trying to suss out where his relationship with Ellie went “wrong.”

The narrative incorporates a flashback to the night of their first meeting, and is also interspersed with "intermissions" throughout. While this format felt wholly inventive and unique, in my opinion, it made it harder to get into the story. I also didn’t feel emotionally invested in Nick’s journey. Perhaps it would have been more compelling to see some of the story from Ellie’s perspective. I found Ellie to be the more compelling and likable character. The continuous referrals to pop culture are entertaining if you know the context, but the story gets bogged down by them in places.

I also feel like this should be labeled wholly as a general fiction book and not a romance, because it doesn’t necessarily have the stereotypical “happily ever after” that is an integral component of any romance novel. In the end, I feel like the story has some great moments, but the overall effect was just okay to me.

**I received an ARC of this title courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.**

I received and ARC from Netgalley for an honest review.

I wasn't sure how I was going to feel this book, especially when Nick started to commiserate about his break up, and putting a lot of the blame on Ellie. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't end up like that at all. There were times where I found both Ellie and Nick to be a bit pretentious, but I figured that had more to do with them being British than anything. I found their love story to be rather realistic, that if you don't put in the effort and let personal insecurities get the best of you, your relationship isn't going to survive. I found the ending to be vague but hopeful. I don't usually do romance novels from men, but I did really enjoy this one.

There was one minor detail that was not factual. The Wachowski Sisters were not the Wachowski sisters in 2012. Lilly didn't come out as a trans woman until 2016. Nick wouldn't be calling them the Wachowski sisters in 2012 when it wasn't public knowledge. This should have been caught by both the author and the editor.

Other than that, this was a joy to read and definitely worth reading.

Cute story with an easy to read vibe. I like it from start to finish. A little bit of back and forth in time going on but it’s easy to follow.

I very much enjoyed this novel about a movie-obsessed projectionist with low self esteem who meets a confident, smart woman who falls for him though I agree with her family that she is too good for him--especially as he becomes quite a jerk at times--so it's hard to sometimes get what she sees in him. But I really loved the writing and the ups and downs of the story and their relationship and I love a good a character-driven story. I'll look forward to reading more from this author.

Love, Unscripted was really disappointing. I wasn't charmed by Nick nor did I feel bad for him. The novel shows us the night of his and Ellie's meeting, along with other important memories, and yet I wasn't moved by them. I didn't think they made a good couple nor were they compatible. Ellie didn't seem to be into Nick and she was always making it seem like Nick had come up with the grand idea or had been the one to come up with the best present ever when in fact she was pulling the strings to stroke his fragile ego. Not to mention she wasn't very nice at all, making some weird and mean comments to Nick the first night they met. Why should a woman have to spend most of her time and effort making the man feel like he's brilliant? That he should get credit for all that is going well in their relationship?

Nick is pathetic. He has no life goals or aspirations and was content to live in their shitty flat working as a movie projectionist, even though projectors were going out of use and had been for a while. There's no redeeming quality to him at all and I completely understand why Ellie left him. None of the memories he recounted made me feel anything for him but annoyance. He's a really week character and only sees Ellie through rose-tinted glasses as the girl he loves, not a whole person. He only starts to question his life choices after she left.

This book has an adorable cover and equally adorable premise but is actually about a pathetic boy pinning after his mean girlfriend that he took for granted. I don't need to read this boy's lamenting about losing his manic pixie dream girl.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from Ballantine Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.*