Sharlot Citra is about to have sex with her boyfriend when her mother catches them and rushes her off to visit her family across the world in Indonesia. George Clooney Tanuwijaya is caught in a similarly compromising situation by his father. With the two parents having control over their children’s electronics while they’re grounded, they begin to unknowingly catfish each other while looking for a suitable partner for their child. With George’s family being extremely prominent in Indonesian media, this soon escalates to the two having to fake-date, each disliking the other, neither knowing that the person they had seen in the online messages was not the real them.

I really wanted to like this book. I love fake-dating and dislike-to-lovers, so this definitely sounded promising to me.

The plot is really fun. It has lots of cute fake-dating situations and hijinks. While I think that it could perhaps have been paced a little better, it’s overall just a really light fluffy read, so I could ignore the moments of clunkiness.

Sharlot and George are okay main characters. Neither is unlikable, but they don’t really have any distinct personality traits either. Sharlot mentions drawing once or twice, and George’s eventual career goals are discussed briefly, but otherwise there is not much to make these characters particularly unique. I will say that Sharlot definitely gets more development than George does; her relationship with her mother and with her Indonesian heritage are discussed at length, whereas George doesn’t really get any plotlines of the sort.

Although Sharlot and George’s relationship is very cute towards the end, the development of it felt very rushed, and a little too much like insta-love for me. I think if the pacing had been a little better then it would have been possible for me to ignore the lack of anything interesting in regards to the main characters, but, unfortunately, it just jumps from them hating each other to being in love with each other extremely quickly.

The side characters vary a lot in quality. George’s younger sister, Eleanor, is a definite highlight, but definitely acts much younger than her 13 years of age. Sharlot’s cousin, Kiki, plays a similar role on her side of the family (though she’s about the same age as the two protagonists), and is probably my favorite character. The two of them provide virtually any and all comic relief in the story, and their presence is a breath of fresh air next to the comparatively flat protagonists. There’s also an LGBTQIA* plotline that I won’t discuss much for fear of spoiling the book, but I don’t personally feel that it was handled as well as it could have been; it either should have had more depth and build-up or not been included. It very much feels like an afterthought, simultaneously breaking up the plot and not affording the characters involved the respect they deserve.

I did really enjoy reading about the Indonesian setting. The characters do a lot of exploring, and I liked learning more about Indonesian culture, something which I wasn’t horribly familiar with before reading the book (and still am not super familiar with afterwards, but it’s a start). I can’t speak to how good the representation is, but I’m pretty sure it’s #OwnVoices, so I’m going to assume that it’s good unless I see any reviews stating otherwise.

Another thing I enjoyed was how sex-positive the book is. By nature of the premise, there’s a lot of discussion of the dichotomy between the older generation in both protagonists’ families being very anti-sex, and the younger characters being much more nonchalant about it. It never strays away from YA territory (there’s nothing even remotely explicit), but I think that the open dialogue about it is something that’s important to see in YA books.

Overall, Well, That Was Unexpected is a fun, fluffy YA romance. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for much character depth or interest, but if you just want a quick read to get your fake-dating or dislike-to-lovers fix then you can’t really go wrong with this. I’m giving this book 3/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.