Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - Kill the Boy Band

This was a perfect book. For me. I cannot and do not widely recommend this. This is a very specific book for a very specific type of person.

First of all: the band in the book is not One Direction - but it's One Direction. This book is for people who were (are) intense One Direction fans during their hype, but on the older end (like fans 18 & up, rather than 13-16yos they were initially marketed to); fans who were just as crazy, but had a smidgen of self-awareness about it. Fans who read/wrote RPF but didn't genuinely believe any of the band was secretly dating each other. Fans who now look back on One Direction and think "they were (are) just regular dudes." A heavy and specifically boyband fanaticism with a sprinkling of realism. Probably also helpful if the reader's a queer woman (and managed to avoid that whole "i'm gonna marry [boybander]" phenomenon).

This book isn't written like a marketable, mainstream novel. It's written like a - very good - boyband fanfiction. I'm obsessed with it. This may be my favorite book of the year.

EDITED TO ADD: you know that Bob's Burgers episode where Louise wants to slap BooBoo? Take that, age it up, satirize it a little further, and pad out the plot to fill a novel. i.e. if you Understood™ Louise in that episode, you'll get this book.

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teki_p's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

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danileah07's review against another edition

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mysterious fast-paced

1.0

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whilhelminaharker's review against another edition

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3.0

There's a lot of great ideas here, and I think at the least it manages to pull itself together into something very entertaining. However, I have several qualms. The first being that the racial stereotypes and fatphobia are utterly gross. 'Nuff said there. The second is that it doesn't utilize the unreliable narrator factor as much as it could. By the end, I want to be seriously questioning whether any of this is true or just an insane fan's desperate attempt at attention. I want to be doubting throughout how much of this we can believe or not. This is set in the age of Internet standom, where anyone can and will make some crazy shit up - while I like what's there, this aspect could have been played with a lot more.

Third: I wish this had a more ambigous ending. I think this should end with them walking out of the hotel with the world burning around them, and then we can get that cheeky little "was any of this true" question mark. The way it stands, the epilogue wraps everything up way too nicely. I want to be left questioning whether the meeting with Rupert K(which I'm sure is purposefully meant to sound like a self-insert fanfiction) was real or not - instead, it just has to give us that Cinderella pastiche, which just feels like a cop-out.

And finally - I wish it would pick a lane. This is such a fantastic premise, and there's so much here that's ripe with potiental. I can honestly say this book is the only one I've read that comes closest to capturing what pop music fandom in the age of social media is like, and it's deliciously nasty. All of the members having the same name, as if they were printed out in a factory. Rupert P. being the Louis/Kevin of the group(apologies to Louis Tomlinson and Kevin Jonas). The shallow model girlfriend with a name as wonderfully satirical as Michelle Hornsbury(the twist at the end that she's the killer is brilliant. Hailey Bieber is probably taking notes as we speak). The Thanksgiving special, the mayhem when Rupert P. "quits", the "secret gay romance" theories and professional beards. It all speaks to someone who's been in the trenches and knows what they're talking about.

But with so much overflowing materiel, this ends up going in a million directions and feels scattered as a result. Whodunnit murder mystery? Rape revenge thriller? Weekend At Bernie's style comedy? Pretty Little Liars-esque digital paranoia? It all gets wrapped into a bursting-at-the-seams package that is certainly a lot of fun - but good satire is more than just fun. It's fast, clean, and cuts like a knife. It leaves you with something substantial. This needed some more time in the editing room, some more fleshing out of its ideas, and a lot less telling/more showing. Ultimately, the point is that a mysoginistic society deems teenage girls and the things they like "shallow" - but in reality they contain multitudes. Our protagonist certainly goes on a lot of rants about this fact. But you're preaching to the choir here - after all, teenage girls are the target audience of this book. If the story was sharper, darker, and more cutting, a deeper point could have been made than just "fandoms bad...but also good?". It may have been able to actually freak out its audience by holding up a mirror, and daring them to like what they see. The idea here is that this is what happens when stan culture and a dehumanzing entertainment industry are taken to their natural endpoint - but honestly? The "real" natural endpoint may be even more fucked up than this book cares to be.

Also why the fuck did the only Chinese character have to be a homeless orphan and why the fuck is she named after food and why the fuck is she the subject of a million fat jokes and why the fuck is the Latina character the "spicy" one and why the fuck--

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impeachnixon's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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trulydevious's review against another edition

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dark funny reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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subjecta5's review against another edition

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dark funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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tachyondecay's review against another edition

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I put this book down at the start of Chapter 6, where one of the supposed protagonists (a 15-year-old girl) is sexually assaulting a kidnapped 15-year-old boy she idolizes. I don’t care why it’s happening or what justification there is—Kill the Boy Band had already tried my patience with some other red flags as well as Goldy Moldavsky’s style; I was already mulling over DNFing it despite being less than 50 pages in. As usual, Kara needs to learn to trust her gut.

This is supposedly a dark comedy about four 15-year-old American girls who are diehard fans of British boy band The Ruperts (because they are all named Rupert, get it?). These girls are so hardcore that they get a room at the same hotel where the Ruperts will be staying during their appearance in New York City. They end up inadvertently kidnapping one of the Ruperts, though, and holding him in their room, bound and gagged with tights. And that is all I know, because I didn’t even bother to look up how the book ends. I don’t care.

From the beginning of the book, I wasn’t happy with how Moldavsky was characterizing these girls. It felt like she was satirizing the idea of a boy band fangirl. I didn’t want to bring this up initially, because I wasn’t too sure where Moldavsky is coming from—but then I saw this answer from her on Goodreads where she basically admits that she herself hasn’t been a boy band fan girl, and this is all based on watching a documentary about boy bands.

So … yeah. So much of the humour in this book, at least the chapters I managed to read, feels like it is punching down, like Moldavsky is making fun of our protagonists. That’s a weird tone to take for a young adult novel. There’s also some fatphobia with Apple, one of the girls, who was adopted from an orphanage in Beijing (and therefore, presumably, Chinese). Similarly, Isabel is of Dominican descent, but she has patchier Spanish than our narrator and also apparently knows stuff about crime?? This exemplifies the poor attempts at diversity among our main characters. It’s not enough to just toss in a couple of different races if you aren’t thinking carefully about the stereotypes involved. Also, the character development itself is clunky—our narrator (who apparently, according to other reviews, just goes unnamed for the whole book??) just straight-up tells us Apple is an adopted Chinese orphan. Like, maybe save that for a moment where it’s relevant instead of giving us a “crit stats” rundown on each of your friends?

For all these reasons and more, I wasn’t too happy with Kill the Boy Band before we got to Chapter 6. And then, within the first paragraph, there’s the sexual assault. Yeah, it’s just straddling and licking his face—but that is happening while he’s bound and gagged and unable to consent. That makes it assault. And like so much already seen in this book, it isn’t treated with the severity that such an action deserves.

This is an unfortunate trend I see in books, both YA and adult, that try to blend comedy with darkness without verging full-on into horror. Yeah, the premise that a bunch of 15-year-old girls accidentally kidnap a member of their favourite band and maybe (?) end up accidentally killing him is dark. You can also make it funny. But making it sympathetic? So much more difficult. If you want an example of a YA novel that embraces the darkness and doesn’t look away, go read Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair instead.

I just restocked on library books and owned books. Let’s move on.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

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