This Time it’s Real (Ann Liang, Penguin)

Ann Liang’s This Time it’s Real is a vibrant young adult romantic comedy with its heart in the right place. When 17-year-old Eliza Lin’s school essay about her fabricated love life goes viral online, she scrambles under the sudden spotlight and makes a deal with Caz, the charismatic young actor in her class. The pair soon launch into a fake dating scenario that benefits both Eliza’s writing career and Caz’s public image. While the narrative set-up—a cheesy romantic essay written for a high school assignment goes viral online, receiving literary acclaim so far as to get a prestigious editor to approach a student—is a little contrived and unconvincing, Liang still charms the reader with her endearing and relatable protagonist. Fiercely independent, achingly self-conscious, and labouring under the belief that there is ‘something fundamentally unloveable’ about her, Eliza tries to preserve the threads of stable connection and belonging she has in her life, while defensively trying not to connect too deeply to the new people she is surrounded by. Liang skilfully captures the surreal nature of an adolescence impacted by internet fame and the painful reluctance to be vulnerable that romance brings out, as well as creating a grounded sense of home after a childhood untethered to one place. Lovers of Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before will adore this warm and vivacious novel.

Shivani Prabhu is a freelance writer and a nonfiction editor for Voiceworks. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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