Title; The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend
Author; Kody Keplinger
Publisher; Little Brown/Poppy
Publication Date; September 7th 2010
Source; Amazon, paid
Format; Hardcover (previously it was a library book.)
Rating; 1*
Description; Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn’t think she’s the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She’s also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her “the Duff,” she throws her Coke in his face.
But things aren’t so great at home right now, and Bianca is desperate for a distraction. She ends up kissing Wesley. Worse, she likes it. Eager for escape, Bianca throws herself into a closeted enemies-with-benefits relationship with him.
Until it all goes horribly awry. It turns out Wesley isn’t such a bad listener, and his life is pretty screwed up, too. Suddenly Bianca realizes with absolute horror that she’s falling for the guy she thought she hated more than anyone.
Review; This book had been on my want-now list on Goodreads for so long. I was sure I was going to love it!
I. Was. Wrong.
This book...pissed me off to almost no end.
Here's why:
Bianca. The main character is so cynical. She's selfish. She's a bitch.
She did redeem herself slightly. From page...256 to page 280 the book wasn't so bad. But I have been reading this book since April and sighing so much with it because I was annoyed at the main character until that point (the redeeming point was really redeeming for me.)
Some of the side characters helped me get through this book, but the book...I don't know what it is. I usually love books like this. With fluff and angst. But...Bianca. And her ways. And her parents. I just couldn't really get past Bianca's personality to like the book enough.
There seems to be slight slut shaming, where she calls someone a whore in her head. Or she just judges in her head sometimes. I don't know why that annoyed me so much, because we all do it. We all judge people in our heads, even if we don't mean to.
This was all totally redeemed at the turnaround point in the book. Where Bianca seems to have an epiphany.
How much Bianca pushed people away. How much she tried to escape and push her problems away. I don't think she really dealt with that within the book, and I would have liked to see her deal with those problems.
I get that we all seem to push away our problems with things, I know I do, but Bianca was an expert at it. She escaped from her problems until they went away or she let other people deal with her problems for her.
I'm sure there are other things, but I can't remember everything, this book took me months to finish because I kept avoiding it. Which sucks.
Oh, the fact that it ruined Wuthering Heights for me. I've yet to read Wuthering Heights and I've never really heard much about it and who chooses who and so on and so forth. Until this book.
Things I liked about this book:
The epiphany, which is basically Bianca realising that we all feel like shit about ourselves. We all worry about those names; slut, ditz, tease, DUFF. We all feel ugly. We all feel like the DUFF. And Bianca redeemed herself slightly with this. I found I couldn't really hate her as much.
The side characters. At least when Bianca was narrating I could occasionally see a side character that I didn't think was so bad.
The fact that other characters, not just Bianca, started to redeem themselves in the end, if they needed redeeming in the first place.
That's it. That's all I can think of.
Honestly, I think that Bianca was supposed to be disliked, but she was also supposed to be relatable as well. Although she was slightly relatable she was just too...ugh for me.
I think that I would recommend this book. Even with how much it pissed me off. Even though I'm rating it one star. I think someone else could love this book. I just didn't.
I really wanted to love this book, and I'm sad that I didn't even like it like I thought I would...but we can't love every book we read.
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