Fake Skating

Same author, same sharp wit — another enemies-to-lovers YA romance with a movie-obsessed heroine navigating a childhood crush she can't shake.

If you loved Fake Skating by Lynn Painter and are wondering what to read after it, Better Than the Movies is the obvious next stop. Liz Buxbaum is a hopeless romantic who believes in picture-perfect love stories — until her childhood crush moves back next door and her annoying neighbor Wes keeps crashing her plans. Like Fake Skating, it's built on the childhood-friends-to-lovers foundation, complete with banter that crackles on every page, a protagonist who's her own worst enemy, and the specific ache of wanting someone you're not sure wants you back. Painter's signature breezy pacing is fully intact here, and the stakes feel just as personal. Readers who were drawn to Dani and Alec's push-pull dynamic will find the same satisfying tension between Liz and Wes. A natural pick for fans of YA romance with humor and heart in equal measure.

Fake-dating pact at a family gathering fuels slow-burn tension — same trope engine as Fake Skating, with summer stakes and grief threaded underneath.

If you're searching for books like Fake Skating by Lynn Painter, The Summer of Broken Rules hits the same trope sweet spot. Meredith enlists a near-stranger to pretend to be her boyfriend at her family's annual Martha's Vineyard gathering — a setup that should be simple but quickly becomes anything but. Like Fake Skating, the fake-dating premise is the surface story, but the real drama lives in the emotional baggage both characters carry: grief, family expectations, and the fear of what happens when pretending starts to feel real. Walther's dialogue is warm and specific, and the slow-burn romance rewards patient readers the same way Painter's does. The setting is sun-drenched instead of ice-rink cold, but the emotional architecture is strikingly similar. Great for readers who want their YA romance grounded in genuine feeling rather than pure wish fulfillment.

Childhood neighbors who drifted apart, a romance that almost wasn't — deeply felt YA with the same bittersweet friends-to-lovers ache as Fake Skating.

Readers who gravitated toward the childhood-sweetheart history between Dani and Alec in Fake Skating will find a lot to love in If He Had Been with Me. Autumn and Finn grew up next door to each other, shared everything as kids, and then slowly became strangers — until the feelings they buried refuse to stay buried. Like Fake Skating, the romance here is less about meeting someone new and more about finally seeing someone who was always there. Nowlin's prose is quieter and more introspective than Painter's, but the emotional core — the specific heartache of a relationship that almost happened — is very much the same. If you've been Googling "what to read after Fake Skating" and want something that leans harder into the bittersweet end of the friends-to-lovers spectrum, this is your book. Be warned: it earns its emotions the slow way.

YA romance with high internal stakes, sharp dialogue, and a Minneapolis setting — different circumstances, same emotional intensity for character-driven romance fans.

For readers who liked Fake Skating by Lynn Painter because of its emotionally honest take on young love and its willingness to let the stakes feel real, The Fault in Our Stars offers a complementary experience. Hazel and Augustus fall for each other under circumstances far more urgent than a fake-dating arrangement, but both books share a commitment to making the romance feel earned rather than easy. Green's dialogue has the same quick, specific quality that Painter fans tend to love, and both authors trust their teenage characters to carry genuine emotional weight. The themes here are heavier — illness, mortality, the cruelty of circumstance — but the core experience of two people talking their way into loving each other is very similar. A strong pick if you want to stay in YA romance territory but are ready for higher emotional stakes.

Family secrets, a romance shadowed by things left unsaid, and a twist that reframes everything — for Fake Skating readers who want more narrative tension.

Fake Skating by Lynn Painter hides its sharpest edges inside a breezy romance — the family secrets and the social-media fallout are always pressing against the fun. We Were Liars takes that same structure and cranks the pressure up. Cadence returns to her wealthy family's private island and slowly pieces together what really happened the summer everything changed, with a romance at the center that's as much about what isn't said as what is. If you were drawn to Fake Skating's layered storytelling — where the fake-dating plot is really a story about trust, family dysfunction, and the courage to be honest — Lockhart's novel delivers that same layered quality in a more suspenseful package. This is a strong recommendation for readers who finished Fake Skating and found themselves most gripped by the family-secret thread rather than the romance itself.