Love, Lies, and Cherry Pies by Jackie Lau

Welcome Back, Booklovers! Crawling out of a reading slump slowly and I decided to read a romance from my backlist. I own many Jackie Lau books all gifted by publishers or free e-book offerings  and I'm ashamed to say I haven't read most of them. This was the only one I had the audiobook for so it became my in the car read. And once I was a significant amount into it I decided to finish it outside of the car. I received a finished copy of Love, Lies, and Cherry Pies from Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review.

 

Emily Hung is an author who also works as a barista and is still barely making ends meet. She's in her early 30s and unsatisfied about her marital status, inability to afford a decent apartment on her own downtown, and her position as an author of color in the very racist publishing industry. In an effort to stop the pressure from family in regards to her love life she decided to fake date Mark Chen, a seemly perfect prospect hand selected by her mother.

The title truly makes no sense in the context of this book. I can probably count on one hand the number of times cherry pie was mentioned. It wasn't a significant food/dessert to the couple nor did it hold special meaning in the story. So I'm perplexed that it made it's way into the title. We get a couple mentions of a cherry pie milkshake but truly it was nothing special to the story. Nobody in this is a baker either. They never bonded over cherry pie!

Though I'm someone who is invested in publishing even I experienced fatigue when it came to the constantly info dumps about the publishing industry. Maybe some of the information might be fascinating to readers who have no idea about the inner workings of the publishing industry. If you've spent years on bookish social media around authors of color none of what was discussed here is new to you. At times it felt like Emily was an avatar for the author and her frustrations with publishing. The constant unprompted inner monologues about everything wrong with the publishing industry and how being an author who is traditionally published worked, detracted from the romance itself. The author also failed to highlight the positives when it came to Emily as a creative. I can't even remember what her books are normally about let alone what the current book she was writing is about. Every chapter she was trying to write but couldn't because she was in a writing slump.

Another weird choice was the switching from most of the book being Emily's pov to randomly including Mark's pov in the second half of the story. It didn't add any new insight and only seemed to lengthen a story that was droning on at a slow pace all book. Mark had a cute cat but was otherwise a very forgettable love interest that had little chemistry with Emily.

The themes of being in your thirties and not achieving everything you thought you would hits very close to home for so many people. There's so many aspects that are very relatable in this story that were bogged down by pacing and repetition.