Lucy Score wrote a 560-page rom-com that somehow earns almost every one of those pages. That's the first thing worth saying about Mistakes Were Made, because at 17 and a half hours of audio, this book asks for a real commitment — ironic, given that its heroine is allergic to the concept.
Zoey Moody is the kind of character who'd be insufferable in real life but becomes magnetic on the page. She's a disgraced literary agent hemorrhaging money, selling off her designer wardrobe piece by piece while crashing in small-town Pennsylvania. She's sharp, chaotic, and deeply guarded. Gage Bishop is her landlord, a lawyer-slash-construction-worker who lives in a converted barn with a golden retriever that has no concept of boundaries. He wants a wife. She wants a one-night stand. You know exactly where this is going, and yet Score makes the trip worth taking.
What struck me most listening to this — often late at night when I should have been sleeping — is how well Score balances genuine comedy with emotional weight. There's a scene involving a man hiding dimes around his grieving sister's house that hit me like a freight train at 1 AM. I went from snort-laughing at Zoey's inner monologue to quietly tearing up within the span of maybe ten minutes. That tonal range is hard to pull off in print. In audio, it's even harder. But Lila Winters and Sebastian York make it look effortless.
Winters captures Zoey's frantic, self-aware energy without making her sound cartoonish. There's a real person underneath all that bravado, and you can hear it in the way Winters modulates between Zoey's public confidence and private panic. York gives Gage a steady warmth that never tips into boring nice-guy territory. When his world gets rocked by a devastating family secret, York's delivery shifts in a way that feels earned rather than performative. The dual narration format works beautifully here — you get genuine chemistry between two distinct vocal performances, and the switches between perspectives never feel jarring.
The Gilmore Girls meets Schitt's Creek comparison in the marketing isn't lazy shorthand for once. The small-town ensemble cast is eccentric without being precious, and Score populates Story Lake with enough side characters to fuel a whole series (which, of course, it is). Zoey's best friend Hazel is a romance novelist whose presence adds meta-commentary that's genuinely funny rather than eye-roll inducing. The supporting cast — Gage's brothers, the town's various personalities — gives the story its depth and warmth.
Here's where I have to be honest about the sprawl, though. At this length, the book occasionally loses momentum. There are subplots that feel like they're setting up future installments rather than serving this story, and some stretches in the middle act where I wished Score had been more ruthless with her editing. The central romance has enough heat and tension to carry a tighter narrative, and there are moments where the surrounding story crowds out what you actually came for. I had a similar patience-testing experience with Court This Cruel and Lovely, where the romance was strong enough that the extra scaffolding around it felt more like an obstacle than an enhancement. It's not a dealbreaker, but if you're the kind of listener who gets impatient when a book wanders from its main thread, you'll feel it.
The infertility storyline deserves mention because Score handles it with real care. It's woven into Zoey's character in a way that explains her avoidance of commitment without reducing her to a single trauma. The book doesn't treat it as a problem to be solved by the right man, which I appreciated. It's messy and complicated and doesn't wrap up with a neat bow.
Score also trusts her readers enough to let the humor do heavy lifting without undercutting the emotional stakes. The banter between Zoey and Gage crackles, and there are exchanges that I rewound just to hear again. When you're doing that with dialogue in an audiobook, something's working.
For anyone coming from Things We Never Got Over — Score's breakout hit — this feels like a more confident, more polished version of what she does best. The humor is sharper, the emotional beats land harder, and the small-town setting feels lived-in rather than assembled from rom-com parts. The audiobook production is clean, with no music or sound effects to distract from two narrators who clearly understand these characters.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you love small-town rom-coms with real emotional heft and don't mind investing 17+ hours, this one's a no-brainer — especially if you enjoyed Things We Never Got Over. Skip it if bloated middle acts and series-setup subplots make you twitchy; you'll notice the padding.
Is it perfect? No. It's about two hours longer than it needs to be, and some of the subplot scaffolding for future books creates a sense of narrative congestion that occasionally stalls the romance. But the highs are genuinely high — the kind of listening experience where you find yourself grinning alone in your car or crying into your pillow at midnight. (Ask me how I know.) Score knows exactly what she's doing with your emotions, and Winters and York are the perfect vehicles for her particular brand of chaos.
