Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC of Rent a Boyfriend in exchange for an honest review.

Rent a Boyfriend was so cute! Chao takes what could have been a simplistic story and uses it to give us two lovable, realistic-feeling protagonists. I love how neither Chloe nor her parents are ever portrayed as the 'bad guy' in their relationship. This felt like a very real family facing some very real conflict.

My one complaint would be how quickly these two fall in love. It's written as if it's a slowburn but for some reason we go from "fake relationship" to "oh shoot I love him/her" to "let's slowly become friends" to "oh shoot I like him/her" to "let's become more than friends". See the problem? I get wanting to make it clear that they're both attracted to each other from the get go but you can do that without having Drew thinking about how wonderful and amazing Chloe is (especially because as a reader who was inside Chloe's head, even I didn't know her well enough to agree with him at that point) and I was genuinely confused to find that I still had 80% of the book left to go. We quickly shift back to slowly building up a relationship so I don't get why this wasn't just a slowburn instead of trying to be insta-love and a slowburn at the same time.