I was delighted to get this ARC of This Time It’s Real because I love Ann Liang’s If You Could See The Sun, a high-school drama uses a supernatural invisibility power to tell an oddly realistic story about class, money, and adolescence in Beijing.  Her new book, This Time It’s Real, uses some fake-dating, a handsome soap idol and internet fame to tell another oddly believable Beijing high-school story.

Teenage Eliza Lin is assigned a personal essay for school, but like many of us assigned to share a personal memory with our teacher and classmates for a grade, Eliza obfuscates a few details. She doesn’t want to share anything about moving countries every couple years for her mom’s job and constantly changing cultures, so she doesn’t exactly tell the truth. OK, fine, Eliza writes and submits a total fiction about falling in love with her perfect, totally non-existent boyfriend.

Now, the essay is going viral, and instead of being the new girl at their Beijing high school, she becomes the writer. The amazing writer, with an amazing secret boyfriend. The tide of school gossip feels realistic, and as her essay takes off online, Eliza finds more and more opportunities come her way from that complete lie, I mean, that essay. She can’t possibly back out now and be seen as a weird liar!

Eliza makes a careful plan to cover it up with a mutually beneficial fake-dating (the PowerPoint of dating reasons is the only scene where she resembled our study-machine Alice from If You Could See The Sun) with a TV actor and her classmate, Caz Song.  Obviously, Caz has experience playing the romantic lead on TV, but as their fake-dating scheme starts to incorporate more time together, visiting each other’s families, and so forth, it starts feeling less fake.

It’s great because even though you know basically how it’s going to unfold — there’s no chance she’ll just come clean immediately and no chance that fake-dating a guy with legions of fans will go unnoticed — the fun is how Eliza does it.  Love the premise, love the Beijing culture shock comments, and loved Eliza’s little sister. Such a fun story.