Review

Eliza Lin has been on the move her whole life: her mother is an executive in a big company, so their family’s moved from China to London, to New Zealand, to Singapore, to the US and back to China. Except for her best friend Zoe, Eliza’s used to the way friendships fade and die. She doesn’t feel like any relationship can be sustained, so she doesn’t see any point to making friendships at her new school, the International School in Beijing. No one seems very interested in making friends with her anyway.

Then a personal essay Eliza writes about a romantic relationship goes viral. This lands her some dream opportunities, including an internship with Craneswift, a boutique journalism website, which could launch her writing career.

The only problem is: she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She’s never had one. She made the whole thing up. Any minute now, someone’s going to find out, and she’ll be outed as a fake on social media, and bye bye writing career.

Then she accidentally overhears Kaz Song, fellow student, superficial teen heartthrob and star of a dozen C-dramas, on the phone to his mother. He hasn’t even started brainstorming the ideas for his college application essays yet. Eliza has a brilliant plan. Kaz can pretend he’s her boyfriend; she can help him with his essays. It’s perfect! All they have to do is last for six months, the length of her internship, and then they can stage a break-up. But as she spends more time with Kaz on ‘dates’, she realises that there’s more to him than she realised. The last thing she wants to do is catch feelings. After all, Kaz is just acting. None of this is real. Right?

*

I read this book because I loved Liang’s recent YA release (I Hope This Doesn’t Find You), so I thought I’d try her earlier work. It’s well written, and I became quite invested in the characters. Liang writes quality description and imagery, and her character’s motivations are pretty believable (except I still don’t know why Eliza would think an essay about a romantic relationship would be less embarrassing than writing about family or friends). Liang also has some lovely humorous touches. Eliza is a fully imagined character with believable strengths (although I did not rate the short quotes from her viral essay, sorry), emotional weaknesses, and cute quirks. I also really enjoyed the Beijing setting: I felt like I had a window on this new (to me) world.

However, I definitely prefer I Hope This Doesn’t Find You, which is funnier, gets off to a swifter start, and, to be fair, I just prefer a dark, Byronic romantic hero. Also, although there are some quite good romantic bits in This Time It’s Real, there’s much less romantic pay-off for the reader, which is a tad disappointing. Like, you’ve just put us through a lot of romantic tension; we deserve a proportional resolution! (If you, like me, feel strongly on this topic, I highly recommend Liang’s later novel, which does this in spades.)

Overall, it’s a good quality, entertaining read, good for students who prefer a lighter, less intense romance and an enjoyable coming-of-age narrative.

*

Audiobook tip: try listening at 1.25 speed. The narration was a bit too slow for my liking, and the narrator left weird little gaps at completely random parts of some sentences. Speeding it up helped.

A little note on the book cover: not a fan. Compare it to the cover for I Hope This Doesn’t Find You, which really communicates the complex relationship that drives the novel.

Age: 12+

Pages: 352

Audiobook: 9 hours 37 minutes

> Click here for content information… spoilers! Enter at own risk!

YA depictions of: lying; writing someone else’s college essay for them; emotional damage from moving around so much as a child/young person; mild online nastiness; description of a bad injury and not receiving medical attention straight away; possible fatal injury and rush to hospital (it’s all fine); two kisses, although one of them is stated not described. A few f-words and s-words.

*

Liang, A. (2024). This time it’s real (M. Chang, Narr.) [Audiobook]. Penguin Random House Australia.

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