A Review of Jenn P. Nguyen’s Fake It Till You Break It (Swoon Reads, 2019).

[xiomara]

A Review of Jenn P. Nguyen’s Fake It Till You Break It (Swoon Reads, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, I remember really enjoying Jenn P. Nguyen’s debut, and I decided to save this particular book, Fake It Till You Break It (Swoon Reads), for a time when I knew I wanted to be entertained. Let us use the description from the official Swoon Reads website:

“Mia and Jake have known each other their whole lives. They’ve endured summer vacations, Sunday brunches, even dentist visits together. Their mothers, who are best friends, are convinced that Mia and Jake would be the perfect couple, even though they can’t stand to be in the same room together. After Mia’s mom turns away yet another cute boy, Mia and Jake decide they’ve have had enough. Together, they hatch a plan to get their moms off their backs. Permanently. All they have to do is pretend to date and then stage the worst breakup of all time—and then they’ll be free. The only problem is, maybe Jake and Mia don’t hate each other as much as they once thought...”

So, my first response when I was reading this novel was that it did tread some similar ground to Nguyen’s first novel, The Way to Game the Walk of Shame. In that particular novel, the main character manages to convince a popular boy to pretend they’re in a romantic relationship with each other. This character wants to avoid the negative publicity when it seems as though she has had an overnight hook up. To evade this kind of scrutiny, she is able to create this “fake” relationship to change the discourse on her romantic escapades. The “fake” relationship paradigm is carried over to this latest novel. For those of you who are even remotely aware of romance plots you can already tell that Mia and Jake are really destined for each other, so it’s really only matter of time before you wonder when each character is going to realize that they are supposed to be together. Perhaps, what’s best about this novel isn’t that we know the formula but that we also know that Nguyen has to throw a wrench into the “will they or won’t they” equation. By the time Mia and Jake realize that they are meant to be together (at least for their teenage time being), Nguyen has been planning for a hammer to drop, one that is absolutely logical and makes you wonder how the pair will recover. I must admit, I was expecting that period to perhaps be longer than it was, but these two protagonists are very likable, so you’re not entirely sad to see the work it out so quickly. The one critique that I had was that Nguyen used an alternating first person narration that I found to be difficult to distinguish. I sometimes found it challenging to figure out who was actually speaking, but fortunately the chapters are also labeled with the name of the character that is doing the narrating. Other than that, Nguyen’s Fake It Till You Break It (Swoon Reads, 2019) is certainly a work that will delight fans of the high school dramedy.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.swoonreads.com/m/fake-it-till-you-break-it/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Nicholas Clark
Web Posting: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Nicholas Clark, PhD Student in English, at nclar004@ucr.edu