Fake Dates and Mooncakes: The Buzziest Queer YA of the Year

I’ve always love books centred around food and culture and this was no exception. Getting to learn about the traditions, recipes, phrases and Mid-Autumn throughout the book was something that made this book for me, it was woven throughout the story so meaningfully.“We have the destiny to meet across a thousand miles.”Seeing Dylan and Theo’s relationship develop was the sweetest, and left my heart feeling as soft and gooey as a Snow Skin Mooncake. I love that Dylan stood by his family and continually put them first and the way he stood up for himself too, it was refreshing and wholesome.The writing and plot flowed nicely and the characters, both main and side, are charming, likeable and have a lot of depth and intricacies to them; showing Sher’s ability to write genuine characters that feel very human at heart.You can tell how much love and care was poured into writing this book and how much it means to Sher. Overall, an absolutely incredible and endearing debut and one that I highly recommend sinking your teeth into.I’m desperately hoping for a few more books with these two cuties and of course, gorgeous little Clover too.

A easy and sweet ya romance

I need to get a mooncake. This is so much fun. I really fell for the main characters and needed a happy ending for everyone so badly. I won’t say too much but this is a wonderful exploration of Asian culture in New York explored through the meeting of two very different guys from vastly differing backgrounds. Most importantly it is a super fun read with a beautiful romance at its heart. Please return to these characters and the family and friends around them for another novel. They’re too good to say goodbye to just yet.

I've been part of Sher Lee's street team for this book since the beginning and it has been an absolute blast. Seeing behind the scenes of the publishing industry has been so fascinating and Sher was so upfront and friendly with all of us! I had very high expectations for this book when I finally started reading it and I can happily say that they were met and then some!FDAM is the story of Dylan, who is an aspiring chef and decides to participate in the Mid-Autumn Festival, both in memory of his Mum and to also bring some publicity to his aunt's struggling take away. Enter Theo Somers, charming, handsome and VERY rich. Oh, and he may need a date to a family wedding...I'm really struggling with what to write for this review. All I want to put is READ THIS IT'S ADORABLE but I'm not sure that's convincing enough 😂 Dylan and Theo were such a sweet pair, endlessly supportive of one another and always helping each other out. Also a huge shout out to Dylan's family who I want to be adopted by. The warmth and kindness they exuded was just so cute 😩 I loved learning about the culture Dylan grew up in and ALSO the food descriptions. Yum.This was such a quick and easy read filled with heart, food and adorably sweet boys, if you ever need something to make you smile I highly recommend picking this one up.My many thanks to the publishers and Sher Lee for gifting me a copy of the book ❤️

While the main characters could have been emotionally fleshed out more, I was obsessed with all the food descriptions, everything left my mouth watering and wanting to explore and taste test mooncakes near me.

It gives a good feeling and doesn't dive right in

This book was a wonderful story of love but most importantly family. I found the interwoven details and exploration of the characters culture so interesting and they really added to my enjoyment of the story as I learnt a lot throughout the novel.Overall i found the story to be such a sweet and heartwarming read and i would absolutely recommend.

I cannot tell you how much I loved this book. What a beautiful story. I loved the love story and characters, and I loved all the descriptions of food. I loved how easy it was to read, it just flowed, no effort.Hours of happy, undemanding entertainment, that left me feeling so warm and happy. Perfect.Oh, and the cover’s just as beautiful as the contents. Don’t miss this when you need an uplift!

There is a lot of food culture and Chinese culture in this pages. This seemed to be the main thrust of the story. There were also two boys falling in love. While I thought the romance aspects fell slightly short in terms of development, I still loved it. I loved the main characters, I loved the story, I loved the meaning. I smiled. A lot.You should 100% read this.

The book was very cute. The characters were well written and weren’t annoying. The overall story was pretry interesting. Would definitely recommend this book for people that like cute books

Erg gehyped boek, dat iedereen moet lezen blijkt, nou dat heb ik dus gedaan. Kaft is mooi en verhaal redelijk, veel over eten en de culturen/smaken en familie-gevoelens daar rondom. De karakters zijn een beetje saai. Verhaal niet al te onderhouden, ach ja een beetje YA boek. Het viel mij tegen omdat iedereen zo lovend was over dit boek.

I usually complain about books being to long but in this case it was to short. It’s not that I wish that it should be longer because I enjoyed reading it but because the book would surely have been better if it was longer and better written. The author put to much time on unimportant stuff and to little on important stuff in this book. The pace of the book was uneven and that made the story bad.!spoilers!In the beginning the characters met each other almost immediately which I don’t have a problem with but it was after that that it went downhill. They had basically met two times when Theo asked him to be his fake date to a family wedding and out of nowhere Dylan was whisked into Theo’s family drama. We barely knew anything about the characters and the interactions they had in the beginning didn’t feel real. The way Theo just showed up at his school and whisked him away at a date? didn’t feel like a way a real person would behave. It felt more like the author needed the characters to interact in some way and was to lazy to actually write a good beginning of the story.The pace in the beginning was fast and everything happened fast but when the MC’s arrived at the wedding it suddenly slowed down and showed that the author is very much capable at writing a good detailed story. This made the fact that the pace got faster after the wedding even more disappointing because then we knew that the author could write a good story but didn’t want to put time on the ‘unhappy moments’ between the characters. This book focused solely on the good moments between the MC’s but nothing on the drama between them. When Theo and Dylan find out that it’s Theo’s butler, Bernard, and his best friend, Adrian, who have been trying to keep them apart they go to confront them but it’s solved immediately after Bernard explains why he did it and so on. I’m not joking when I say that that entire incident, from when they return form the wedding to when Bernard drives Dylan home, is like 30 pages. When just before that we got to go on a wedding that was 80 pages long. I barely had time to understand what was happening before something else happened because the pace at that part was so fast.This author skimmed through some parts of the story and made others more detailed, which in itself isn’t a problem but when you decide to put more time on a wedding, a few (long) interactions with the characters and how to make mooncakes instead of the plot it doesn’t end well. Like I would have wanted to see the drama in more detail for them to then go and solve it. I would have wanted the drama with Theo’s father to be more detailed, for their break up to be more heartfelt. I would have wanted to see the characters grieve after the breakup. Because they did solve everything in the end but it wasn’t satisfying when the breakup had lasted around 20 pages. When all we had gotten was glitter and rainbows but almost no sad moments it just made the entire book one sided. If you aren’t capable of making your characters feel sad or heartbroken, but can only make them experience good and happy moments you shouldn’t write romance.

Dylan and Theo , you have my heart ..But my favourite character is Clover the corgi 😍The book cover is so cute, bought only after seeing the cover and there's no regrets coz the story is just my type, light-hearted romantic comedy of Asian-American community