Below is the complete list of Lynn Painter books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Better Than the Movies Books
Publication Order of Mr. Wrong Number Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
- Accidentally Amy (2022)
Accidentally Amy was published in 2022 and is listed as book #1 in the Standalone series. 
About Lynn Painter
Lynn Painter is an American author of romantic comedies for teens, adults, and younger readers, best known for Better Than the Movies and the breezy, banter-heavy style that has made her a major name among contemporary rom-com readers. Her fiction is built around familiar romantic setups—fake dating, second chances, enemies-to-lovers tension, mistaken assumptions, road trips, school crushes, sports celebrity, family complications—but her appeal comes from timing, voice, and the pleasure she takes in characters who are funny before they are smooth.
Painter’s public author identity is closely tied to romance as both genre and culture. She writes openly for readers who love rom-coms, pop-culture references, grand gestures, awkward misunderstandings, and the emotional payoff of characters realizing that the person irritating them may also be the person who understands them best. Her official biography describes her as the author of Better Than the Movies and as a writer of romantic comedies for tweens, teens, and adults, which neatly captures the range her bibliography has developed across age categories.
Her breakout came with Better Than the Movies, a young adult romance about Liz Buxbaum, Wes Bennett, grief, fantasy, and the way real love complicates the scripts people carry in their heads. The book became strongly associated with BookTok-era YA romance, helped by its movie-loving heroine, soundtrack energy, and affectionate use of classic romantic-comedy conventions. Painter later returned to Liz and Wes in Nothing Like the Movies, turning the original book’s teen-romance promise into a more complicated college-age sequel about distance, change, and whether a couple can survive beyond the glow of the perfect ending.
Painter’s YA bibliography also includes The Do-Over, Betting on You, and Fake Skating. These books show her interest in high-school settings where humor and romantic tension sit beside uncertainty about family, identity, friendship, and the future. Fake Skating, published through Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, uses childhood friendship, fake dating, and a hockey-town backdrop, while the publisher identifies Painter as a #1 New York Times bestselling author and lists YA titles including Better Than the Movies, The Do-Over, Betting on You, Nothing Like the Movies, Fake Skating, and Trust Fall.
Her adult romances move in a slightly different register while keeping the same comic rhythm. Mr. Wrong Number and The Love Wager use mistaken communication, attraction, banter, and messy adulthood as their engines, while Happily Never After plays with wedding disruption and anti-romantic cynicism. Accidentally Amy has also remained part of her adult-romance readership, especially for readers who enjoy workplace-adjacent flirtation, secret identity, and fast verbal chemistry. These novels are lighter in tone than many contemporary romances, but they are not weightless; Painter often lets family pressure, disappointment, embarrassment, and self-protection sit beneath the jokes.
Painter has continued expanding her audience beyond teen and adult romance. The Wish Switch brought her into middle-grade fiction, adding magical mischief to her usual interest in friendship, awkwardness, and emotional wish-fulfillment. In 2026, First and Forever extended her adult rom-com line into sports romance, with Penguin Random House listing it as a Berkley publication about a football star, a diehard fan, and a fake-dating publicity setup.
Lynn Painter’s bibliography works because it understands the rom-com contract. Readers come for sparks, jokes, tropes, and satisfying endings, but they stay because her characters feel delightfully unpolished: loud in their heads, quick with the wrong response, hopeful even when pretending not to be, and always one chaotic scene away from telling the truth.