Book Report: Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie by Jackie Lau
🤓📚🥧🍒💋🥰
I waited slightly too long to write this, and the book isn’t too fresh in my brain. More like it’s been sitting out on the windowsill and maybe a mischievous little critter ran off with my thoughts on the book, and all that’s left is a delicious cherry pie fragrance.
Based on what I do remember, here’s a short, informal book report on Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie by Jackie Lau, a book I really enjoyed!
Quick summary: Emily Hung’s mom tries to set her up with a guy at Emily’s sister’s wedding. Mom has been singing this guy’s praises for weeks leading up to this point. Emily is immediately turned off by the guy, Mark Chan, especially biased against him because her mom picked him out for her. Sneaky mom isn’t easily deterred, so she sets up a brunch date trap, feeding Emily a fib that she’s actually meeting her. At brunch, Emily and the guy decide they’ll fake date to appease their parents. They end up getting to know each other through their dating ruse, then Emily is like, Hmm, maybe this guy isn’t so bad, after all!
Super fun.
Books about writers are polarizing.
Yeah, not everyone is a fan, but I usually am! This book hit particularly close to home, all about a broke writer trying to cobble together a living while working on her writing. At this point, she’s still working full-time as a barista while working on edits for her second book and writing her third for her three-book deal. Ouchie. Yeah, too real.
This book made me LOL like, 10 times.
It also made me feel giddy. The main character, Emily is funny and relatable. (Something in the back of my brain is telling me relatability is an annoying thing to point out, but whatever. She is! Not to say that all main characters have to be, just that it was something I enjoyed about this particular main character.)
Tropey!
I didn’t know that the fake dating trope was for me, but it totally is! Because Emily hates Mark right away, it also has like, a slight enemies-to-lovers vibe, which I loved.
Slow burn and a little bit of spice. The book cover touts Jackie Lau as being amazing at emotional pay-off, and I found that to be pretty spot-on. I could’ve done with more spice, but it was a good amount for this kind of rom-com! Right at my level of expectation, I’d say.
Closing thoughts.
Recently checked out another book by Jackie Lau, Donut Fall in Love, and excited to read that!
Food is central to the novel I wrote, too, so I feel a kindred connection to Jackie Lau. I kind of wish the cherry pie had been more important to the story, actually! It felt more like a fun annex than something that was naturally intertwined with the rest of the story.
I love intersections of food and love/sensuality/decadence/indulgence!
I don’t know how many of you are fellow romance lovers, but it’s a rule that romance and rom-coms end with a Happily Ever After (HEA) or a Happy For Now (HFN). I enjoyed that Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie’s HEA was also about Emily’s writing career! I won’t spoil it with too many details, but I thought that was lovely and pulled off in a “realistic” way. (I kind of don’t care that much about fiction being realistic, but Emily’s writing career was so real, I’m glad that her writing HEA was, too.)
Because Mark’s last name is Chan, this song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend kept getting stuck in my head. IYKYK. <3 I couldn’t find the scene from the show fully in English, but maybe you’d enjoy it in Spanish or the song in Thai with the rest of the scene in English?