THIS TIME ITS REAL BY ANN LIANG

 

Uh oh, (semi) unpopular opinion alert...

This Time It's Real by Ann Liang is about Eliza Lin, who goes to an international school in Beijing. One day, an article she writes for a class assignment somehow goes viral. The article was about her relationship with her boyfriend. Only here's the thing: Eliza has never had a boyfriend. Yup, she made up the whole thing. So now she feels that has to convince the whole world she is dating someone. She chooses to fake-date the most popular boy at her school: Caz Song, who also happens to be a popular C-drama star. Eliza's viral article ends up also getting her an internship at Craneswift: a popular publishing company. Her main assignment as an intern is to write blog posts about the dates she and Caz go on. With all of this going on, Eliza isn't sure if her relationship with Caz could ever become real, especially since she has trouble getting close to people. Her mother's job requires her to travel a lot, and Eliza has never had a stable group of friends, let alone a boyfriend. 

This story started out as cute and promising as it sounds, but the second half of the book was kind of disappointing. There was nothing problematic per se about the content of the book, but the majority of my issues with it lie more with the writing and execution of certain plot points.

Honestly, I will just list all the problems I had with the book here:

• It's a fake dating story, but there is never any point of the story where the MCs felt like an actual couple. I got zero romantic chemistry from the two of them. Honestly, the whole time they just felt like two coworkers who are overly polite to each other because they just tolerate each other. They didn't even feel like platonic friends!
• The story had a tendency at times to introduce concepts/people that seemed like new plot threads, but then the author didn't do much with them, or they were resolved too quickly. For example, Eliza sometimes talked about some of the students in her class who seemed really nice and they were complimenting her article and her and Caz dating. I thought maybe Eliza would try to make friends with them and she could have a new friend group at the end of the story, but she never does that. The rest of the people in her class were just minor characters that didn't add much to the plot. Also, we never get a resolution on her experience working at Craneswift! Caz also says he has some family drama, but his mom only appears once in the story and his dad never appears. I wish the author could've delved more into his struggle with lonliness like Eliza, but it never happens. Even with Eliza her psychological problems are just skimmed over. 
• Coming off of that, I understood that Eliza had trouble making friends because of her history of moving around a lot and the difficulty it was to maintain long distant relationships, but the story seemed to focus too much on her and Caz. I mean yeah, it's a romance story, but I wish we could've also seen her feeling more comfortable having all kinds of friends. Even the brief falling out and reconciliation with her long distant friend Zoe didn't feel very fleshed out to me (back to part of my last bullet point of things being resolved too quickly). Honestly, I wish the book's format was more like the anime Kimi ni Todoke where, like Sawako, maybe Eliza should've gotten some friends first and then her relationship with Caz (like Sawako with Kazehaya) came second. 
• Also, I know I kind of have to be willing to suspend my disbelief with these kinds of books, but how the heck did Eliza's article get so popular in the first place? It says in the very beginning of the book after it happened that someone popular online retweeted/reposted it or something, and I thought there was going to be some overarching mystery of Eliza trying to figure out whodunit, but it never happens? I found that kind of weird! If I was Eliza in that situation, I would've done an investigation into who did it, but the situation is kind of dealt with in a way like "Oh yeah. That happened. Oh well." It felt unrealistic to me. 

So yeah, it was not a well written book, even though it had the potential to be. I gave it 3.5 stars. 

Know any better fake dating romance books?