Book Review: Loveboat, Taipei

A cute contemporary read with a diverse main character perspective…..um hell yea, sounds like a blast! I read Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen and enjoyed it quite a bit.

Synopsis: When eighteen-year-old Ever Wong’s parents send her from Ohio to Taiwan to study Mandarin for the summer, she finds herself thrust among the very over-achieving kids her parents have always wanted her to be, including Rick Woo, the Yale-bound prodigy profiled in the Chinese newspapers since they were nine—and her parents’ yardstick for her never-measuring-up life.

Unbeknownst to her parents, however, the program is actually an infamous teen meet-market nicknamed Loveboat, where the kids are more into clubbing than calligraphy and drinking snake-blood sake than touring sacred shrines.

Free for the first time, Ever sets out to break all her parents’ uber-strict rules—but how far can she go before she breaks her own heart?

I rather enjoyed this book and had a great time with it. Ever goes through a lot of hardship and grows as a character immensely from the beginning to the end of the book. Her growth comes from developing as her own person being away from her family and on her own for the first time. Her life up until this point was very scheduled by her parents and now she has the chance to understand what freedom feels like and to be able to make her own decisions based on what she wants.

It was also very interesting to learn more about Asian culture as Ever spent most of the book in Taipei. She was even experiencing a lot of this for the first time as well being an Asian American citizen and growing up in America.

The romantic scenes in this book were very real and down to earth and some of them were very hard hitting and brought out the emotions in me. That is a sign of a good book.

I felt like the book had a natural flow to it which helped with advancing the plot. It wasn’t everything to me so that is why I only gave it a 4 out of 5 stars but it was a cute, adorable, diverse rom-com and I would recommend reading this one as I did enjoy it!

Book Rating: 4/5

You can buy this book on Amazon and find it on Goodreads.

Disclaimer: This book was sent to me in physical ARC format by Harper Collins in exchange for an honest review.

Check out Lisa King’s brand new novel called The Vanishing Hour which is available now on Amazon! She is a Canadian author from London, Ontario and I am super excited to share the love on her new book! If you like post-apocalyptic books, then this one is for you!