Irene Li has spent her whole life living in a shadow.
No matter how hard she tries or how she tries to present herself, Ace Zhang somehow always manages to come out on top. As the bane of her existence and the heir to ZVT, China’s biggest company and the company her family often partners with, there’s no one in the world who she hates more than him.
But when her parents want to grow the family’s company further, Irene is dragged into another one of their “brilliant” business marketing strategies—getting into a fake relationship with Ace.
At first, Irene swears that everything is just for the sake of her parents, their family’s company, and for her own future. After all, how could she ever let herself fall for the boy whom she swore ruined everything good in her life?
But when what’s meant to be fake starts to be real, Irene must decide between two to ignore what she truly feels, or to risk everything and let her real feelings consume her.
as a fan of ann liang, i was so excited for this book when i heard about the plot bc it’s academic rivals + fake dating. unfortunately, it was hard to get through. i tried to finish it bc it’s only 212 pages long, but i just couldn’t force myself to keep going. there’s countless typos throughout the book, the way the mmc talks is so oddly formal that it just sounds so unnatural that a high schooler would talk like that. irene is okay i guess, but tbh this book felt like a ihtdfy dupe if you just replaced the hate emails with a fake dating plot instead. i didn’t feel connected to the characters & i didn’t like the writing. i think it was a good plot idea, but the execution could’ve been better.