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My friends at Penguin Books Australia kindly sent me an advance copy of Lying Is My Love Language for review. This debut rom-com follows a city girl finding love in the Australian outback – if she can only stop lying long enough to embrace it.
The protagonist, Jamie, has lived a life of rapidly rotating Tinder dates and a copywriting job that just barely earns her enough for a small apartment in a nice part of town. She is also, it must be said, aggressively millennial – which I can see alienating some younger readers, even if I myself can sympathise a little. She has big Eldest Daughter energy, in the sense that she seems to have made People Pleasing her personality (all the while coming off as bitter and caustic, which isn’t particularly pleasing at all).
Jamie keeps life interesting by lying to each of these one-night-only suitors, pretending to be into running, or rock climbing, or whatever special interest makes their eyes light up. Lying is basically her only hobby – until she meets Luke, a grumpy but charming farmer, at her friend’s outback wedding. He sees right through the game, and they fall into a messy situationship of sorts.
The premise of Lying Is My Love Language is fine – an evergreen rom-com plot – but the prose gave me the ick. There’s a lot of repetition in form, with sentence structures that you see frequently in AI-generated text. “Not X, not Y. Just Z.” “The kind of A that makes you B.” “[Blank], as if [blank].” Maybe some of this will be cleaned up in the version that hits bookstore shelves, but it’s hard to imagine what will be left after a rigorous final edit (especially if they also take out all of the Quirky Character Facts that are mentioned once and then forgotten, like “the time Jamie made a PowerPoint to argue with her teacher about notebook margins”).
I think Lying Is My Love Language shows promise conceptually, but needs a bit more work to be execution-ready.
Read Lying Is My Love Language on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)
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