St. Pete author takes Amazon Prime on a romantic ‘Drive’

For rock-solid proof that Hallmark hasn’t cornered the market on twisty boy-meets-girl romance movies, consider Drive – The Pretenders, newly available on Amazon Prime.

The boy is Dante, a hunky, bad-boy superstar driver on the Formula One racing circuit. Women melt in his presence. His female counterpart is Sarah, a plucky, pragmatic mechanic assigned to Dante’s team. She’s immune to his charms. But Sarah aspires to drive those fast, hot cars too.

They each have secrets.

The Florida connection: It’s based on Drive, a 2015 romance novel by St. Petersburg author Tamara Lush.

A former journalist, Lush has written 25 books to date. Initially, her chosen genre was romance, but after the pandemic she changed her focus to mystery novels, set in Florida. She writes these under the name Tara Lush.

What makes Drive different is that the characters, and the actors, are German, the dialogue is in German (you can watch it with subtitles, or with dubbed-in English, French or Spanish).

The film was made by Bavaria Fiction, a German production company, and shot in Germany, the Czech Republic and on the breathlessly beautiful Mediterranean coastline of Sorrento, Italy.

Unlike Hallmark’s cookie cutters, Drive is very sleek and very Euro. It moves fast. The music is hot.

Author Tamara Lush visited the set of “Drive” in Italy. From left, director Sergej Moya, Koroll, Lush, Baahmed and co-producer Karsten Günther.

Getting a movie made from her work, Lush said, “was never a goal of mine. It was never a dream. It was not something I even entertained. The odds of that are very, very low.”

Drive, she explained, was her second novel. “I was just kind of feeling out what sort of a writer I was.”

LEARN MORE: Arts Alive! podcast: Author Tamara Lush

Lush, her father and her husband are all longtime fans of Formula One racing. She set the book in that world simply because she knew something about it, planting her young lovers in the middle of the high-stakes European racing circuit.

If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big.

After Harlequin rejected the manuscript, Lush self-published it, then put it up on Wattpad, the online sharing platform for writers and readers.

On the site, Drive was read three million times. Wattpad re-published the print edition in 2022.

(Drive is the first book in Lush’s series The Pretenders; all three are set in the world of auto racing, although the Dante and Sarah story does not carry over.)

Once Bavaria Fiction got involved, Lush said, she knew her work was in good hands.

“Obviously, I wouldn’t want them to turn my book into something racist, sexist, something objectionable, but I knew that they wouldn’t. So it wasn’t really a concern for me.

“Because frankly, I love what they did to it. I actually think that the way they handled it is better than the way I handled it in the book. I was just starting to learn to write romance, so I put a lot in the book that maybe I wouldn’t have put in.”

The producers and screenwriters did make changes, in the characters and in the story.

“I love the book, and I love the movie, but I think the way the movie did it was really good,” Lush enthused. “And I can see why they made the choices they did, and I fully agree with them.

“Here’s the thing. The way I feel about my work, in general, is that once I’m done with it, and once the public reads it, it is no longer mine. I don’t really worry about what other people do or think.”

She has a new murder mystery novel coming out this month, a “bonkers romp” titled The Florist’s Guide to Homicide.

Set in Sunny Shores, Florida, a town bearing a striking resemblance to Gulfport, Lush calls it The Golden Girls Meet Only Murders in the Building.

Drive – The Pretenders is generating massively positive reactions from young viewers, on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms.

Will there be a sequel? “A lot of people are asking. I’d love to know, too! I’m hopeful,” Lush said.

“To me, it’s all just gravy. I never anticipated this would happen, and so it’s just a really cool experience. Especially because I don’t write romance any more.

“Although I have to say, it’s gotten me to think about writing more romance again. But I’ve been busy killing people in my mysteries in Florida.”