This is a fun rom-com. Perfect for fan of Steven Rowley and fans of Broadway. Noah is a character that moves from unlikeable to sympathetic and the reader is really rooting for him by the end.

I am not sure I liked the main character at all. This was like Gilmore Girls except Rory thinks she’s very much above the whole small town thing. The entire town worships her no matter what but she thinks she’s better and smarter than all of them and she HATES the festivals. And after being continually proven wrong, she still can’t admit her shit stinks just like everyone else. That’s the main character in a nutshell. He’s like every musical theater gay guy trope you can think of for wayyyyyyy to long. The rest of the characters were so lovely and likable and maybe that made him feel even worse but you would think that after multiple humbling events and conversations he would chill tf out with his elitism but he makes a joke about not wanting to visit a trailer park like 65% of the way through the book. That’s wild.

I really like the premise of the story and you can tell the author knows his stuff. He went to Tisch and he’s been nominated for SIX Tonys for playwriting and lyrics. I just wish he wrote a more likable main character 😅. I would absolutely be interested in reading his future books.

A clever return-to-the-hometown second chance gay romance for the ages. It's got a lot of camp and I'll take it.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy. This book had everything you could want when dealing with the theater: one-liners, set changes, song riffs. I felt the passion Noah was pouring into his musical and loved his determination.

Totally fine and forgettable romance, I enjoyed the LGBtQ aspect of this one but I thought it was totally just kind of fine

I will normally devour a book like this, but I had to force myself to finish. It's less romance and more of an observation of dysfunctionality.

When I pick up a romance, whether it be single title or category, I expect sex scenes. This book was so bland it could have been middle grade. It's almost as if the author and publisher forgot this is an ADULT title, an LGBTQIA+ story to boot. There's no heat, passion, or anything else that makes this romance other than some kissing and a few trite words tossed around like a baseball during ball practice. Publishers lean into heterosexual romances, but give short shrift to same-sex ones almost as if they're listening to the far-right evangelicals instead of readers.

In any romance, I also expect to have two main characters I actually like. Noah is unlikable throughout the book, although the author tries to have him do a 180 in a matter of weeks, something I found unbelievable and forced. It's not that he's unredeemable; he's detestable. Why would poor Luke latch onto this guy based on some puppy crush from high school? Luke's obsession for this man makes no sense.

The time in which all this happened played like a stereotypical gay man hopping from one relationship to another. One minute Noah is deeply committed to Chase, and the next minute he's deeply committed to Luke. That's less of a romance than bar hopping by a single gay man looking for sex (which I did plenty of in my youth). Even worse is that the second deeply committed feelings are with someone whom Noah remembers as being mean to him for years in high school. That would take more than a few weeks to overcome. This premise would have worked much better without Chase in the picture. If lovelorn, single Noah had returned to his hometown after a failed Broadway musical, then it would have been more believable that he fell for someone who carried a torch for him all these years.

To top it off, the author decides the answer to having a long-distance relationship is to have Elton John hire Noah out of the blue to be a lyricist after hearing just one song that Noah wrote in a single night. Right, because we gays stick together like that. That's the moment I wanted to throw the book across the room, but doing so would have broken my tablet.

If someone is looking for an LGBQIA+ romance, this isn't it.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. This was a cute and quick Achillean read. 3.5 overall.

At first Noah annoyed me because he was so naive and bratty. But as the book went on I could identify with him way more than many other characters. He had faced a lot in his life, and as the saying goes “hurt people, hurt people.” I can identify with the feelings he had about not being enough, but also being too much. It can do a number on your life. Equally relatable was the need to control when everything is going wrong, which can lead to people seeing you as a horrible person.

Luke’s character was less exciting for me. He gets portrayed as this amazing can do anything type of guy, but it felt like he lacked depth overall. He had quite the back story, but there wasn’t much there other than some minor freak outs around losing people (which again makes sense given his background). It sort of felt like the very rose colored glasses view of him.

Least favorite character was Chase. Other than creating to push for Luke and Noah, he was just shallow. And I could spot what he was going to do from the first few chapters. I think while this could be a negative, it shows a well-written character because you could just tell he was the type of person who is selfish.

I feel like the real stars of this novel were the women in Noah’s life. Quick witted for being a small town. His mom seems truly wonderful. Love that he can go to her with his problems. His two female friends are just so lovely too. I 100% relate to the use of sarcasm as a love language!

Other love- broadway and musicals! This is the main reason I wanted to read this book, and even though fiction you could feel some of the real experiences of the author.

Overall, a good first novel and enjoyable read.

Thank you so much to Penguin Group for the ARC of Showmance in exchange for an honest review!

Fresh off a Broadway catastrophe (sing a few bars of “Changing Lives” from the Prom, why don’t you?), Noah Adams returns to his hometown in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, to lick his wounds and try to put himself back together. His career as a playwright in peril, he ponders his next move only to discover that his agent has arranged for him to put on a local version of the very musical that sank him. His failure on display is one thing, but to make matters worse, he keeps running into the town’s good ole boy and Noah’s former bully, Luke. Luke is handsome and opinionated and Noah finds himself not only re-thinking Plainview, and his oldschool projections of Luke, but possibly himself as well.

Funny and undeniably charming, Showmance is a sweet, easy read primed for a Hallmark adaptation. I personally am a softie for a small town of quirky characters so this was really perfect for me. Noah’s character was at times frustrating, and some of the storylines felt like they could have been developed deeper, but it’s always nice to read something feel-good. Like going to the theater, it’s a slice of escapism and really all about belonging. They say that life is a stage, and sometimes the best moments happen unexpectedly… So take a deep breath, and get out there.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book in a day, but I did it with Showmance! This was a fast-paced, funny, and undeniably adorable book. We have Noah, an out gay man from a small Illinois town who is going through some career struggles as his musicals flop time and time again. He returns home when his father has a medical crisis, and finds that his family’s farm has hired one of his high school bullies to work there. Miscommunication occurs (but it gets better). Cute shit happens (I won’t spoil it). All this happens while he puts on a local version of his most recent musical in his hometown.

I wasn’t a theater kid growing up, but by god this book made me want to be one. It had me giggling, swooning, and just the right amount of cheese.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the copy of my arc :)

Very Hallmark movie and super fun!
I am excited to hear the author speak at my local library next week.
What a fun story featuring theater.
I have so many friends I am going to recommend this to.

This is quite a nutty story. I was going to give it 3 stars until I read the author's note which explained how many of these characters are based on real people, especially his mother.
Noah Adams is a small town Illinois boy who grew up enamored of theatre. His memories of high school are filled with being bullied as the gay kid, and community theatre saved his life. He went off to New York, became a playwright with a cool agent who also became his boyfriend. However, his big Broadway show, a musical based on King Lear in a spaceship was a flop.
He goes home when his father has a heart attack and is convinced to put on his show at the community theatre.
This is really a valentine to small town theatres, lovingly portrayed by the author.
The dialogue is sometimes over the top, but how the theatre company helps Noah put some heart into his play, and the ramifications of that change Noah's life.
A fun gay Rom Com with a lot of love.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the EARC. This is my honest opinion.

Let me tell you, I went into Showmance without knowing anything about it and I left laughing, crying and smiling like a dork. What a gem of a book. It is a queer romcom about Noah, a playwright whose musical on Broadway opened and closed in one day and after that flop, he returned home to his small town to take care of his dad and reprises the failed show in the local theater. This book had so much heart. So many biting one liners. So much snark. So many laugh out moments. I loved the adorable romance. I loved the dynamics of the cast mates. I loved the small town vibes. I loved all of the characters. I loved the openness and inclusivity. I loved seeing Noah come into his own.

Ah I love a good theater story!

Showmance follows Noah Adams, a playwright whose first Broadway musical just opened and closed in the same month. Down on his luck, he visits his small home town in Illinois. There the local community theater has decided to put up his show, and wants him to stay and direct. Stepping away from the big time in NYC might be exactly what he needs.

I had a great time reading this story. Warmed my theater loving heart. Noah is a complex character that was easy to identify with, and I enjoyed following his journey back home. All the characters from his home town were cute and quirky and fun.

4.5 stars

3.5 - super cute rom-com with snark and a musical! My kid and I both love musicals, so I knew I just had to read this and I liked it a lot.

Noah, a playwright who has been struggling, returns to his small hometown in Illinois to put on a version of his failed musical. He is filled with snark and I love it - though sometimes he does hurt others, but he tries to make amends for that, so at least he is self-aware. Sorry - but I just found him hilarious and wish we could go have brunch together - I would just die laughing around him, I know.

Luke, Noah's high school era enemy, was a sweetheart 7 I'm glad they got their HEA. All in all, if you love musicals, small towns, low spice, fun side characters, and snark, this book is for you! It was for me ;)

Many thanks to Netgalley for this ARC- I really enjoyed it and this is my honest review.

A fun debut!! Noah is funny and dramatic and is overall a just a good MC. I am a sucker for a book set in a small town. Love a close-knit community. Sometimes the dialogue choices are interesting, but by the end it is just a feel-good read.


Thank you to Viking/Penguin & Netgalley for sending me this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

A definite must read for fans of rom-coms with the trope of enemies to lovers.
When Noah’s broadway musical doesn’t go as planned, he heads home to his parents with his boyfriend, Chase.
There he is met with his high school nemesis, Luke.
The story unfolds and we are thrown into the showmance!
Super cute, fast paced and entertaining.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks, Penguin Books, for the advanced review copy via NetGalley (available 1 Oct 24).

Noah heads to his small hometown after his first Broadway musical fails. There, he helps stage an amateur version of his play (musical!) and tries to avoid Luke, a jerk from high school who is now sweet and gorgeous.

I want to watch this as a NetFlix movie starring Andrew Rannells (or Adam Devine) with a cameo from Stanley Tucci (or Cher!). I’m a sucker for musical theater and a big moment, so of course, I teared up at the end. But overall, this was a miss for me.

Noah’s latest attempt at a Broadway musical has flopped. Badly. It lasted for only one show — much like his previous attempt — and Noah’s heart is breaking from a combination of embarrassment and grief that even his boyfriend, Chase, can’t comfort. That’s when the night goes from bad to worse, as Noah gets a call that his dad is in the hospital with a heart attack.

Back home, Noah reunites with his mother and his childhood bully, Luke, who works for Noah’s dad on the farm. The local theater company — which used to be Noah’s refuge from the harassment and bullying in school — wants to perform his flopped play and asks him to direct it. With Noah’s mother guilting him into staying, Noah is forced to come to terms with his play, why it failed, and what he can do to fix it. And, with Chase gone back to New York, Noah has time to get to know Luke again.

This story pushed so many of my buttons and I have things to say about how it absolutely didn’t work for me. To start with, Noah as a character feels formless, as if he speaks according to the script, but the script seems to hate him, because Noah is always in the wrong. He is, in almost every single situation, the aggressor, the asshole, and the judgmental jerk who says cruel, hurtful things. This allows everyone around him to show him, with quiet dignity, how right they are and how wrong he is, so Noah can apologize and learn from them and be a better person. (There’s a brief attempt near the end to suggest Chase and the Big City taught Noah some bad habits, but it lasts all of a paragraph.) Noah says random and cruel things. For someone who knows people who grew up in trailers, why does he make a comment about how terrible people living in trailers? He says things out of nowhere that don’t feel like they come from the character, but rather some script that wants Noah taken down a peg or two so that he’s … what, at Luke’s level?

All through high school Noah was bullied by Luke and his friends, and by his father, who told him repeatedly to suck it up and be a man. Only, according to everyone else, that’s not how it happened. Luke was never a bully, he was a good guy who stopped the bullying. And Noah’s dad didn’t mean any harm when he ignored the bullying. He loved his son and didn’t know how to show it. In fact, he was the one really hurt by the bullying because he couldn’t protect his son. When Noah finally has a chance to confront one of the boys who threw a garbage can of food on him, the guy shrugs and says sorry, my bad, leaving Noah looking like the aggressive one for confronting him. The bullies are sorry, so it’s all water under the bridge, and Noah, can you stop being so dramatic about it?

Next, this book has cheating from both Noah and Chase, but only Chase is called out for it. Noah gets away with it, presumably because he’s the main character. Luke kisses Noah one night — knowing, knowing — Noah has a boyfriend. When Noah tells his mother about this, she shrugs. When he reminds her he has a boyfriend, she shrugs that off too. When he asks if he should tell his boyfriend someone else kissed him, she says it depends on what Luke’s kiss meant to him. So, she’s fine with her son cheating so long as it doesn’t mean anything? But when he doesn’t immediately tell his boyfriend what happened, she’s cold and judgmental. Noah’s cheating doesn’t seem to matter though, because Chase is cheating, too. But his cheating is evil, and now Luke can get all self-righteous about how he knew Chase wasn’t good enough for Noah.

Noah is estranged from his father — and it’s this relationship that had the best line in the book: “When I was a kid I would catch him looking at me like I was somebody else’s luggage he picked up at the airport by mistake.” There’s so much potential there and I kept looking for those moments to show up, but it never goes anywhere. In the one scene where Noah finally has a moment alone with his father, it’s brief and hollow because there’s been no groundwork to establish how the two men are feeling. (Also, his father is sedated after a second heart attack.) But this one relationship — one that shaped his entire play, an adaptation of King Lear, a play about the connection between a parent and child and the pain and distance between them — is sidelined in favor of Noah’s mother. Again and again, she’s right there between them to explain away what’s going on rather than letting the two characters talk, bond, heal, or even share a glance.

Noah’s mother is the quirky artist who paints eggplant emojis, her poor innocent mind never knowing what they mean (but of course she knows, because she’s clever like that), who gossips about everyone, has an opinion on everything, and will not leave Noah alone. He wants to sleep in? Tough! She has a clown costume for him to put on so he can go paint faces at the fair. Does he know how? Doesn’t matter! Does he want to? Also doesn’t matter. Mother has spoken. She’s also right there to tell Noah to be nicer to his father, to explain away their problems in her mother knows best way, and turns every scene into a Noah was wrong, Mother was right message. She likes Luke, so Noah should fall in love with Luke.

This book fully embraces the “quirky small town” trope where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and all of them somehow know better than Noah how to fix his play. Then, because of this colorful cast of characters who came up with all the ideas and did much of the character work and choreography, Noah gets credit for being a skilled playwright. Look, I have nothing against the idea that different people have different opinions, and maybe Noah was too close or too fixated on something and was missing the forest for the trees. But only once is Noah right about anything.

While I’m not personally a fan of the small towns know best sort of mentality that fills this book, the fact that Noah had to be taken down a peg each and every single time got so exhausting. The cheating, the bullying — which seemed to exist solely to show Noah he should get over it — the relationship with his father, none of it worked for me. And it’s not helped that the blurb already let me know that things wouldn’t work out with Chase, because the blurb was about Luke. It was so heavy handed, lacking any nuance or subtlety or character that I honestly really didn’t like this story. Personally, this is a solid pass.

I always love a book that weaves in music somehow, and that’s what first drew me to Showmance by Chad Beguelin. Noah Adams has just had his Broadway debut… but his musical, Stage of Fools, is an immediate flop. He goes back to his small hometown in Illinois to be with his parents after his dad’s heart attack. While there, his local community theater is preparing to put on a production of Stage of Fools, and Noah gets roped into directing it. The guy he hated in high school, Luke, is helping out with the stage production. But is there more to Luke than Noah remembers? Could there be a romance brewing beneath the surface?

Tropes & Narrative Devices:
- (One-sided) enemy to lovers
- Fade to black
- Small town
- First-person POV (Noah)

What I Liked:
- Musicals! I love music in all forms, and musicals have a special place for me. Noah is a musical playwright, and though his Broadway debut didn’t do well, he still has the music in him. I loved the many references to musicals and their songs and watching Noah and his community revamp his musical.
- Noah learns valuable lessons. He’s not always likable at the beginning, but we get to accompany Noah on his journey to some needed self-improvement. He learns how to be less hard on himself and see success instead of just failure. How to listen to others, even if they’re “less qualified” or “lowbrow” or just not the Broadway set he’s used to. Ways to improve his musical by stripping away the pretentious fluff and giving it heart. How to be less of a jerk and be kind to others. Where to recognize love even when it’s not said in words.
- Luke! The way Noah first described Luke, I wasn’t so sure I’d want him to be the love interest. But he won me over very quickly! Noah may have been wrong about some things, and Luke is so sweet.
- Noah’s mom! What a fun and wacky woman. I love her.

What Didn’t Work for Me:
- Noah is dating a different character, Chase, for about the first 50% of the book. That’s too long! I wish they had either broken up within the first couple of chapters or that Chase was only Noah’s manager, not his boyfriend. That would have opened up the romance between Noah and Luke to being able to start earlier.

Final Thoughts
Showmance is a romance full of heart. There’s some snark and mean humor from Noah early on, but I love the journey he goes on and how he and Luke eventually get together. This novel is about family and community as much as romantic love.

I want to thank NetGalley and Penguin Books for sending me this book for free in exchange for an honest review.

Honestly, I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. The cover is not my favorite and, personally, I don't think I would have picked it up in the wild. But I'm glad that when I found this book in NetGalley, I decided to just focus on the blurb and let it pull me in.

It's such a lighthearted book with hilarious and over-the-top characters that are hard not to love. There were moments when I did stop for a split second and went "Well, that was a choice" but it never took me away from enjoying the book. Noah is insufferable in the best way possible, but it's also amazing how he grows as a person throughout the story. Luke is such a sweetheart and I like how Chad Beguelin dealt with Luke and Noah's history.

I have to admit that the book did make me tear up. As someone with a complicated family history, mainly with my dad, I'm always a weak bitch for stories whenever there are themes of parents-children relationships. I'm trying so hard not to spoil the book because it's such a heartwarming and unexpected part of the book, so I will refrain from saying more and just let you see for yourself.

Lastly, I'm not really a theatre or musical type of person (although I do love Shakespeare) but I have always had a respect for it so even though I might have not understood all the musical theatre references, I still had a great time learning about it. (I'm also writing a novel where the love interest may or may not be a theatre student at NYU, and this certainly gave me some ideas).

If you're looking for a quick good time with characters that never fail to make you crack up and help you escape for a moment, I suggest you hurry up and grab this book.