Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie

A Novel

English language

Published 2024 by Atria/Emily Bestler Books.

ISBN:
978-1-6680-7908-9
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A charming rom-com about a young woman’s desperate attempts to fend off her meddling mother…only to find that maybe mother does know best.

Mark Chan this. Mark Chan that.

Writer and barista Emily Hung is tired of hearing about the great Mark Chan, the son of her parents’ friends. You’d think he single-handedly stopped climate change and ended child poverty from the way her mother raves about him. But in reality, he’s just a boring, sweater-vest-wearing engineer, and when they’re forced together at Emily’s sister’s wedding, it’s obvious he thinks he’s too good for her.

But now that Emily is her family’s last single daughter, her mother is fixated on getting her married and she has her sights on Mark. There’s only one solution, clearly : convince Mark to be in a fake relationship with her long enough to put an end to her mom’s meddling. He …

3 editions

What in the patriarchal nonsense

It gets two stars instead of one because of the mom's apology and explanation, but holy shit, this book was terrible.

The characters/style of prose fell very flat for me. The narrators didn't do a great job describing any feelings of tension, so all the intimacy seemed like it was just dropped into the middle of the plot with no fanfare. The big four-letter-word reveal at the end had no tension around it whatsoever - the FL tells the ML she loves him in the middle of an explanation and it goes completely uncommented.

And holy shit! The supporting characters!!! You cannot tell me for an entire book how the FL's mom won't listen to her in any conversation and is being pushy beyond reality, and then expect me to forgive her because she explained she ruled out a bunch of other men for practical reasons. Every time …