✔️ Opposites Attract
✔️ Workplace
✔️ Dating a Celebrity

I loved the LA/Entertainment industry/academia setting. Also, can I tell you how badly I want to take the class that Maeve and Val are teaching?!

I adored both FMCs right off the bat (c'mon look at how gorgeous both of them are on the cover?! hubba hubba). I loved seeing Maeve slowly thaw towards Val, who she'd considered an interloper in her field. And going from thawing to sizzling chemistry? Perfection.

This book was swoony and hopeful with terrific mental health rep and, yes, conversations on communicating better and asking for what you need.

I loved the family and found family here too. Charlie was a standout character in particular.

Steam 🔥🔥
Banter 🗣️🗣️🗣️
Swoon 💕💕💕💕

Nothing is more relatable to me than a lead with crippling anxiety! I loved this sexy, sapphic romance. It perfectly blended together so many of my interests - niche academia, movie musicals, celebrity. It was just perfect and a delight to read!

I enjoyed this book. Valeria and Maeve were great characters. At the start, I was unsure of how I felt about Valeria, since we didn't have the best introduction to her (at least for me), however as the story went on, I grew to like her. In the beginning, the reader gets introduced to Valeria's internal conflicts about her career and wanting to be seen as more than her sexual orientation.

Valeria then takes a job assisting with teaching a class alongside Maeve, our other main character. When they first met, things were a little rocky between the two, and I do wish that we got more of that. I do feel like things transitioned away from the character/relationship building that we could have had before they started flirting.

I think that Charlie was a great side character, as Valeria's best friend. He was such a fun character and was always there for Valeria, and the banter that they had was just so entertaining.

Thank you publisher, Carlyn Greenwald, and Netgalley for the copy of this ebook.

3.75!

The perfect sapphic romance for fans of movie directing, movie musicals, hot women that are able to develop healthy communication skills, and strive for more gay media in the film industry!

Val is an actor and director that has recently publicly come out as a lesbian to her audience, and ever since she came out, she has found herself pigeonholed into strictly lesbian roles, and is facing inappropriate comments and questions about her sexuality in every interview she participates in. In an attempt to escape the toxic environment that is manifesting around her acting and directing career due to her sexuality being picked and prodded upon constantly, Val decides to try being a professor again, and signs up to co-teach a film class on movie musicals. That will be easy, right? It will quell all of her rampant anxiety about work and herself, right?

Wrong. Despite their charged first impressions, the co-teacher Maeve is hot. and smart. and funny. And maybe saw her naked in a movie once.

As they grow to get to know each other, we learn their flaws and hyper-fixations, their insecurities and hobbies, and we learn to basically be obsessed with the both of them together and want the world for them. But first they have to figure out what in the world THEY want, outside of each other.

I loved the realistic touches of the relationships shown in this book, despite the love story of a famous actor and a USC professor maybe being unrealistic in itself. Maeve and Val are at times frustrating, especially Val with her having such a busy career, but we discover all of the valid reasons for their apprehension and the love we see between them and others throughout the novel is so much more believable in the face of all of the complexity they harbor from the time in their lives before they’ve met. The magical symphony of this book is both diegetic and non-diegetic, because even at the times they don’t hear the significance of it all, we do.

TW: they do talk about the musical Cats

solid 3 stars! enjoyable, steamy but i'm not sure if i'd pick this up again to read. thanks netgalley & the publisher for the arc, in exchange for an honest review

Actual rating: 3.75

Another story that took me too long to get into it but then it really picked up about halfway through and I did enjoy it. It follows an Oscar-winning actor, Val, who lands a guest professorship at USC working with another professor, Maeve. She seems a little prickly towards Val at first and then sparks fly as Val realizes Maeve may be attracted to her.

I liked the characters for the most part and really enjoyed the entertainment bits as someone who works adjacent to entertainment. I did not care for miscommunication or the conflict but it isn't the worst of that trope that I've ever read. I do wish we had been in Maeve's head some because I really liked her character.

Valeria Sullivan is at the top of her career as an actress. From the moment she came out, nothing has been the same. She has become a recluse. Now she has found a script that she loved and decided to be the director. The only problem is she has to go out and sell it. The panic sets in on an interview and she leaves. Her option is to honor a commitment to return to academia and teach a class. Maeve Arko is the professor she will be co-teaching the class with. From the very beginning, sparks are flying. Maeve is grounding for Val and the panic lessens. Both when both worlds collide, can she have acting/directing and Maeve? Can she leave the past behind and grab for the future? Or will she sabotage everything? With a little help from a friend, she finds the strength to go for what makes her happy.

𝚁𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐: 4.5⭐️
𝙶𝚎𝚗𝚛𝚎: contemporary romance 📚

𝙼𝚢 𝚃𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜:
An enjoyable sapphic romance

𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚒𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎:
Romantic comedies
“Enemies” to friends to lovers
Celebrity x professor
Great chemistry
Hollywood/ academia setting

𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝙸 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎𝚍:
Jewish rep
Relatable anxiety rep
Charlie!
I found the lecture sections super intriguing

𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝙸 𝚍𝚒𝚍𝚗’𝚝 𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛:
Miscommunication- it went on for so long it started to stress me out lol
I wish it had been dual POV!

I really enjoyed the dynamic between Val and Maeve. I was a little nervous about the workplace dating dynamic but it was done well. I liked their journeys and their growth together. I thought they had good chemistry. There were aspects of their classroom work that I felt dragged on a bit. While I did enjoy the topic of the course they were teaching I found myself skimming some sections because it didn't feel necessary to the plot. I wanted more of Val and Maeve. I also felt like the third act breakup and the reunion happened quiet quickly and the ending felt a little rushed. Overall though I did like this book.

DNF @23% - I definitely rage quite this book. The main character is just so incredibly insufferable. She is so insecure it is actually painful to read. She needs everyone to kiss her ass the entire fucking time or she will get upset. Boohoo. I truly don’t give a shit. On top of that she’s just so uppity. I hate it. She looks down on so much, I wonder why she’s even acting as she clearly thinks everything about it is so incredibly below her🙄🙄🙄. I just can’t with this book anymore. The way she also villainizes (what going to be) the love interest for being perfectly polite to her but just not fawning over how incredible she is is absolutely abysmal. I have not gotten to the point yet where they get romantically interested in each other but I can already tell that the love interest deserves MUCH better.

I liked meeting Val in Sizzle Reel and it was really fun to get her POV in this story. Director's Cut was really interesting for me to read because like Val I struggle with anxiety and have a PhD. However, unlike Val I feel very comfortable in academia whereas everything else she was doing would have caused me a lot of anxiety. There were some inaccuracies in the depiction of academia but I did think that Carlyn Greenwald captured something very poignant about doing something you love while struggling with your mental health. It can be easy to not know what you like when something you love has contributed to worsening mental health.

I really enjoyed Val and Maeve's relationship. They had shared interests and a similar history with relationships but Val's fame made their experiences with life pretty different. I liked seeing how that small thing shaped their perspectives to be very different at times.

If you like reading anxiety representation, books set in academia, or a sapphic romance this one is for you! It had a similar vibe to Sizzle Reel but this one was more of a traditional romance. If you are going to read Sizzle Reel I'd read them in order but this could also be read as a standalone.

Thank you to Net Galley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

Director's Cut hit the mark for all my expectations in a romance novel. An actress trying to breakthrough into directing while also pursuing her dreams of teaching when she co-teaches with another professor, and how they navigate work life and a budding romance. I had so much fun reading this. The story was cute, and the side characters were interesting while not so much they took from the main story.

I do think the book could have been edited in some places where more details weren't really necessary, and expanded on in other areas, but overall this was a great read and one I would recommend friends to pick up.

I honestly feel like this book had a lot of potential but it took too long for me to get into it. The start was too slow like i didn't feel the immediate chemistry between the leads.

A fun sapphic romcom about a late-blooming lesbian just trying to learn who she is, all while being in the spotlight. Both FMCs are down-to-earth and don't let the spotlight get to them, which I love.

I both really enjoyed seeing this peek into a busy, accomplished woman's amazing Hollywood/academic life, and got hit too hard by being inside her head when she was spiralling. If you are a theatre nerd, you need to read this ASAP.

I loved Sizzle Reel! So I was super excited to read Director's Cut by Carlyn Greenwald.
The story was paced really well and kept me wanting more until the end.
Director's Cut is an entertaining, sexy summertime read.
An adorable sapphic romance.

Thank You NetGalley and Vintage for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

DIRECTOR'S CUT is a sapphic romance about valeria sullivan, an oscar-winning actress who finds herself wanting to take a step back from her acting career and a guest professorship at USC provides her with the perfect chance to do so. the only problem is that her co-professor, the brilliant and attractive maeve arko, wants nothing to do with her or their partnership. but as val proves to maeve how much she cares about their class, maeve starts to soften and neither one of them can ignore the sparks between them. i hadn't read anything by greenwald before but i was so excited to get my hands on DIRECTOR'S CUT and it did not disappoint me in the slightest, i absolutely loved val and maeve's dynamic and their banter and bickering as it led way to flirting and fondness. the third act conflict did feel a bit blown out of proportion at first, but as we got more of an insight into val's mental health issues, i found myself understanding her position better and relating to how she handled things. overall, one of my fave sapphic romances this year!!

read if you like:
- hollywood romances
- queer found family
- sexy professors

thanks to netgalley and vintage for the advanced copy! DIRECTOR'S CUT came out june 11th.

Thank you for giving me the chance to read this book. I wasn't that interested, and didn't love it so did not finish it.

Thank you Vintage Anchor and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I’m pretty disappointed because I was very excited for this book, but I could not connect with it. I thought the concept was good and I was excited to dive in, but I read 30% and it never clicked for me. Unfortunately I have to DNF for now.

This was just like okay. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. It was a good like palate cleanser, but I don't know that I'll think about it again,