IMDb rating: 5.3 (as of March 6, 2023)
Nicole is a love-struck college student waiting to meet her pen-pal at a New Year’s Eve party. When he doesn’t show, she finds three other forlorned females facing familiar struggles in the love department. These ladies bond over their shared heartbreak and form a Love Club to support each other through their romantic escapades for the rest of their natural born lives.
Fast forward ten years, and Nicole appears to have met the love of her life. When Warren asks for her hand in marriage, she says yes! Then promptly calls in her Love Squad and heads off in an attempt to reconnect with the pen-pal who had stood her up a decade ago. What better time to find out if he’s the one she is meant to be with than the day after she’s accepted another man’s proposal?
Her Love Squad goes along because they have nothing else going on in their sad and loveless lives. They discover the Inn run by her former pen-pal is undergoing a renovation, so Nicole pretends to be the interior designer hired to renovate the place. Ten minutes into the movie, our heroine has lied about who she is and has run off behind her fiance’s back to find someone else to fall in love with. This is a love story?
Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. Nicole strings along Josh without telling him who she is. She goes through the motions of acting like she is the interior designer, wasting his time and that of all her friends and buying thousands of dollars of stuff to decorate a room (did I forget to mention she is not the actual designer?). While she is squiring him around the property, two members of her Love Squad break into Josh’s office and go through his personal belongings.
It turns out Josh only wrote the first letter that had her head-over-heels in love with a stranger. Someone else wrote the others. Josh suffers from dyslexia, and as a result of his sloppy handwriting, he got a friend to write the remaining letters to her even though this was apparently for a class assignment (Office of the Student Code of Conduct on line 1).
Nicole, who has spun together a string of lies that would make Alex Murdaugh envious, is furious when she finds out Josh didn’t write all the letters. How could he deceive her like that? Never mind that she lied about who she is, lied about why she’s there, and has yet to mention the fact she’s engaged to someone else. No one lies to Nic and gets away with it.
By this time, Josh has convinced himself that Nicole is his one and only. Why he’s fallen head over heels for a woman who’s done nothing but deceive him makes no sense. But she refuses to give him another chance. He decides the best thing to do is to have her meet the guy who actually wrote the letters. Once she sees what a dweeb he is, she’ll run back into his welcoming arms.
But Josh is not a brilliant strategist. He’s lost touch with the actual writer and instead finds the hottest guy in town to play the ghost writer, which leads to a creepy scene at a spa where said dude gives a clearly uncomfortable Nic a massage while Josh spies on them from the next room. Stalker much, Josh?
A member of Nic’s Love Squad finally manages to track down the ghost writer. And it turns out he’s gay! Brilliant. So she is free to love Josh after all (and not the guy she’s been dating for years and recently agreed to marry).
Relationship update: Nic gets cold feet again when Josh asks her to marry him three months later. She immediately summons the Love Squad and they bust it to her hometown to track down the guy who took her to the Sadie Hawkins dance in eighth grade. Maybe he’s really the one.
Actual review: This appears to be an attempt by Hallmark to duplicate the success of The Wedding Veil franchise, but this is one of the worst Hallmark Channel movies I’ve ever seen. And there’s three more of these to go! Please keep them on the Hallmark Movies Now app.
Edits by Todd 
One Comment
Excellent review. Loved the Alex Murdaugh reference. You mentioned some very bothersome aspects that I skipped over because I didn’t want to make this the longest review I ever wrote. But yes the fact that he got someone else to do his college assignment was contemptible.
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