I've followed Fakes Dates and Mooncakes since it was a pitch tweet and I've finally read it!

It’s rare that I see a book from like a pitch tweet and then follow it all the way to publication, but today I’m talking about a book that I’ve actually done that with, Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee. I first found out about this book from something Lee tweeted all the way back on February 17^th, 2022, saying that they had signed an important document about the book. I have been very excited about this book for a long time.

The blurb says meet Dylan Tang: he juggles school and delivery runs for his aunt’s struggling Chinese takeout in Brooklyn. Winning a mooncake competition could bring the publicity they need to stay afloat. Enter Theo Somers: a charming, wealthy customer who convinces Dylan to be his fake date to a family wedding full of crazy rich drama. Their romance is supposed to be just for show… but soon, Dylan is falling for Theo. For real. With the mooncake contest looming, Dylan can’t risk being distracted by rich-people problems. Can he save his family’s business and follow his heart – or will he fail to do both?

Chapter one opens up on Dylan struggling in the kitchen. He’s burning the food he’s meant to be cooking at the takeout place. You immediately see that there’s an 11-year-old running the counter, and then straight away made me think of that meme. That one that’s like you know a Chinese takeaway is good if the child is running the desk, people are screaming at each other, and the walls are nothing but bare white. But you see one of the delivery drivers/riders for Wok Warriors – the takeaway place – has a flat tire, so Dylan takes over. It’s very much, they’re very overworked, so one of the orders is wrong, and the recipient just so happens to be this rich boy who is clearly on daddy’s money who basically just starts yelling at Dylan because the food took so long to get there and was wrong. Like, I get being upset after waiting for so long, but there’s no need to yell at the delivery person, especially since he was offered a full refund. Still, Theo happens to also be in the apartment Dylan is delivering to, and Dylan thinks he’s the boyfriend of flop who ordered the food.

The second chapter was little more than Dylan chatting with his family once Wok Warriors closed, and you get mention of the mooncake contest. It was a short little thing, you get a bit of info about how money is tight and that they literally live above the takeout place too. Something I really appreciated was bits of Dylan’s Asian culture are sprinkled in right from the beginning. Little things like how he’d use Chinese tea to clean counters and just various beliefs, and where other members of his family are in the world. Chapter three comes around and Theo turns up in Wok Warriors, and I’d say this is where the character’s personalities start popping out.

The whole book read like a romance movie. Like things would happen and I’d find them so endearingly cliché, as in it all came off like something you would see in a romance movie, but specifically like one of those ones that came out in the mid-2000s. In that, it definitely came off a little Hallmark-y from time to time, but you know what? I was going in knowing it was going to be nothing more than a romance book, so it’s not like it was disappointing in that respect – it delivered on exactly what I expected it to.

And also, the fact it was partially the fake dating trope… I’ve mentioned it before that I love fake dating. It’s probably my favourite romantic trope. It’s one of those where yes, it’s the same every time but do I care? Absolutely not. In this book, like the blurb says, Dylan goes with Theo to a wedding as his fake date. But this wedding ends up being a whole wedding party even that lasts a weekend up in the Hamptons. Also, conceptually, the Hamptons are so strange to me. I need someone to explain to me why I was under the impression they were in California, and not like next door to Long Island in New York? Still, the fake dating fake dates hard. Dylan has a crush on Theo pretty much from the get go, and he’s basically just trying to stop himself from catching actual feelings.

I enjoyed seeing Dylan submerged in this world different from his own. Like, not only was this book fake dating, it was very much opposites attract, but to an extreme. Dylan and his family are facing eviction, and Theo has a Ferrari. You know like how I mentioned this had a very Hallmark feel to it, I think this was another blob added onto that. So, not only do we have fake dating, we have opposites attract and two people from different worlds that are just so different it’ll never work for the two of them. This is all just a paragraph to say that I do love a good, harmless, romantic trope.

I thought that the book could have slowed down some. There were moments where occasionally things just felt a little rushed. It wasn’t massively regular, it was just the occasional moment where something would be happening, or a conversation would be going on, and then all of a sudden, we’d be somewhere else, without a paragraph or chapter break. This is such a minor thing, and probably the only thing that could be considered negative that I have to say about this book. But even then, that’s me just saying, “Slow down, I want more content and don’t just want to jump from thing to thing.” It’s like, I didn’t want to get to the next thing yet, I was happy to stay where we were for a little.

When it came to the characters, I loved Dylan’s little sister, Megan. She was very much that irritating younger sibling, and I think those vibes were done so well for her. Like I mentioned, since this book read a little Hallmark-y at points, there were definitely a few moments where characters were there with the purpose to just prove a point, or to make a character think or feel a certain way. Like one moment I can think of is when Dylan is up at the wedding event and he hears a bunch of rich people talking, and they’re just very stereotypical rich kids. And towards the end of the book, that felt very Hallmark-y. However, in that sense, I’m not using that as a negative. I don’t know if I was taking the first half of the book too seriously or what, but I kind of stopped caring towards the end and just accepted everything that happened towards the end, and when I did, I just started having so much more fun.

Overall, was this book flawless? No. But I really enjoyed reading it, especially when, like I said, I stopped caring and just started taking everything at face value. At that point, everything just became more fun. And I wasn’t disappointed given that I’ve been waiting to read it since I saw it as nothing more than like a mood board tweet. It was a solid romance book that fulfilled everything that I wanted. I think that’s something I need to start doing – I need to stop trying when it comes to reading and take things more at face value.