Guest post written by The Love Haters author Katherine Center
BookPage calls Katherine Center “the reigning queen of comfort reads.” She’s the New York Times bestselling author of over half a dozen books, including How to Walk Away, Things You Save in a Fire, and What You Wish For. Katherine writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. She’s been compared to both Jane Austen and Nora Ephron, and the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way.” Her books have made countless Best-Of lists, including RealSimple’s Best Books of 2020, Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads’ Best Books of the Year, and many more. Bestselling author Emily Henry calls her summer 2022 book, The Bodyguard, “a shot of pure joy.” The movie adaptation of Katherine’s novel The Lost Husband (starring Josh Duhamel) hit #1 on Netflix, and her novel Happiness for Beginners is now a Netflix original starring Ellie Kemper. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, two kids, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.
About The Love Haters (out May 20th 2025): It’s a thin line between love and love-hating in the newest laugh out loud, all the feels rom-com by New York Times bestselling author Katherine Center. Swim lessons, helicopter flights, conga lines, drinking contests, hurricanes, and stolen kisses ensue—along with chances to tell the truth, to face old fears, and to be truly brave at last.
If I could ban one word from all romance novel reviews, it would be the word “predictable.”
As a writer of love stories who reads lots of reviews (for my books and others), I see this word all the time.
The problem is, it’s not useful. In fact, most of the time, it’s misleading.
Because stories of any genre always have two components going at the same time: the big picture (the overarching structure), and the little picture (the scenes and details). The big picture is kind of where the story’s going, and the little picture is how it gets there.
In any genre novel, the big picture will be predictable. It just is. It’ll head in a certain predictable and genre-specific direction, and it’ll use some basic tropes we’ve seen many times before. Those familiar things are, in fact, essential to the pleasure of reading a genre book, and giving the readers the experience they showed up for.
In a mystery, the detective will solve the mystery—possibly while staying at a large country estate. In a thriller, the hero will get to safety in the nick of time—possibly while grieving his murdered wife. In a spy novel, the spy will outsmart the villains—likely while sporting a tuxedo.
And yes, in a romance . . . the two lovers will fall in love—probably after sharing Only One Bed. If we’re lucky.
Of course they will! It’s why we’re here!
How unsatisfying would it be to open up a love story and not . . . find any love there? How frustrating to spend three hundred pages waiting for these two people to overcome all obstacles and get together, already . . . only to watch them lose interest in each other? Or move to Antarctica? Or get hit by two separate busses?
How appalling.
It’s a constitutional guarantee in a romance: you will arrive at a Happily Ever After by the end. If it doesn’t end happily, it’s not a romance.
Is that predictable? Sure.
But is that really worth talking about? I mean, it’s a given.
Yet we talk about it anyway.
“Predictable” isn’t a neutral word. It’s always got a hint of an eye-roll about it.
We’ve been taught that a good ending must be—has to be—surprising. But I don’t always agree. A surprising ending is one kind of satisfying ending, yeah. It can be terrifically fun to expect one thing in a story and then get something different.
But guess what else can be satisfying?
Oh, for example: being driven into a frenzy of longing over the course of an entire novel—and then, at the end, getting the exact thing you were longing for.
That might even be more satisfying, honestly.
So I’m not sure we need to be upset if a genre ending is exactly what we expected. The author wasn’t trying to trick us. Especially in a romance! Romances are built on a delicious, rising feeling of anticipation. That’s the engine that drives those stories forward and keeps us turning pages.
I’ll point out that anticipation and surprise are opposite emotions. You can’t not be surprised by something you’re anticipating, and you can’t anticipate a surprise.
A romance writer’s most important job is to create a swoony feeling of anticipation for that happy ending. And there’s no way to do that and also surprise people with that ending at the same time.
So surprise—for the ending, at least—has to go out the window.
This really bothers some people.
They saw it coming in Chapter One! They called it!
Yeah. They were supposed to. That was a gift the story gave them. Three hundred beautiful, blissful pages of looking forward to these adorable leads falling into each other’s arms.
A great love story makes you want that HEA so bad—and then it gives it to you.
How glorious.
Did the writer write a “predictable” ending? Or . . . did she create a fantastic feeling of anticipation—and then totally frigging deliver?
All to say . . . at their core, book reviews are about helping other readers decide if they will like a book. And “predictable” is a confounding word in that context—because “predictable” implies failure.
While romance novels have no choice but to be predictable in the big picture—leads meet, fall for each other, lose each other, and then overcome it all—in the little picture, it’s a different story.
Where we’re going is —and has to be—predictable.
But how we get there?
That’s what makes or breaks a romance.
The details of the story—the places they go, the gestures they make, the ways they tease each other, the things they’re afraid of, the nervous habits they can’t shake, that pebble he always carries in his pocket, the ring her grandmother gave her that she spins on her finger—those elements of the story should be endlessly new, and specific, and surprising.
If those things are predictable? That’s not good.
That’s a deal breaker, honestly.
A really great love story has to be about people who feel utterly real—people who we come to care about and root for. People who need each other desperately and who spend a whole book figuring out how to get together.
If the details of that story are predictable? If the characters say the same things you see over and over, and they do the same things, and they go to the same places—and it all just feels overdone and cliché and fake? That’s a bad love story.
So there’s a good predictable in a love story (the ending and the time-honored tropes), and there’s a bad predictable (everything else) . . . and the problem is that nobody ever specifies.
Which one is it? Is the ending predictable? Because that’s a good thing! Or is the dialogue predictable? Because that is most definitely not.
Let’s just ditch ‘predictable.’ altogether. Even when you mean it “in a good way,” it doesn’t sound good.
Let’s talk about anticipation.
More important than saying a rom-com book had a happy ending is letting us know whether or not it built properly toward that ending. Did it stair step its way up higher and higher toward a frenzy of love-longing? Did it zig-zag your heart all around until it cracked the armor around it so you could truly feel all the feelings? Did it make you desperately, madly, salivatingly want these two people to get together—and then blissfully give you that very thing?
That’s worth mentioning.
But that’s not “predictable.” That’s creating a fantastic feeling of anticipation. And it’s not easy to do.
The central question in a rom-com is never “will they or won’t they?” Because they will. They definitely will!
The central question is how much will we all enjoy the ride.
And the answer to that is never predictable.
