Reviews

I didn’t quite share the general love for Frankly in Love, but I enjoyed it enough to give David Yoon’s second novel a go. While Super Fake Love Song has the bones of a good story and thoughtful ideas about morphing identities, the whole thing was just way too “ding-dang” long with far too much telling not showing (though I’m very happy to add ding-dang to my vocabulary).

Sunny Dae is a nerd: we know this because he keeps telling us. We also know this because he and his buddies, Milo and Jamal, create special effect props based on fantasy RPGs. When he’s asked by business contacts of his family to help their daughter, Cirrus, settle into his school, he decides he needs to be much cooler for this hot young woman, so he pretends to be a rock musician like his brother, Gray, used to be. It’s never quite clear to me if Sunny wants to be Real Sunny the nerd or Fake Sunny the wannabe metalhead or if those are even the real Real and Fake Sunnys.

Of course he gets in over his head when Cirrus enters his ‘band’ for the school talent contest, so Sunny, Milo, and Jamal decide to make it really happen, helped by Gray who has now unhappily abandoned being a musician and joined the corporate world.

I think Sunny is intended to be endearingly whimsical but I found him to be annoying instead. His long suffering friends Jamal and Milo, who are helpfully designated for us as the Promoter/bass player and Production Adviser/drummer in lieu of character development, inexplicably put up with so much for him with hardly a whimper. It’s also not clear to me why his longstanding nemesis has a sudden volte face. I thought the semi-tragic Gray was at least relatively subtly drawn, but their rather caricatured over-working parents somewhat abruptly see the error of their ways.

I really appreciate Mr Yoon’s efforts to make a diverse crew of characters - Sunny is Korean-American, Milo is Guatemalan-American, and Jamal is Jamaican-American - but he just does too ding-dang little in the way of developing them and spends too much time on an overly complicated plot.

Thanks to Putnam and Edelweiss for the digital review copy.

mmeagan's review against another edition

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2.0

DNF'd @ 13% into the audio book

i did like the rhythm of the book, and the narrator reads the material well, but i don't like conflicts in stories built around lying and keeping up a lie