I spent most of this book trying to figure out if I was reading good dark comedy, or bad fan fiction. Judging by the Goodreads reviews, most people felt the same way. By the end, I concluded it was more on the dark humor side — but enough of it had me rolling my eyes to drop my rating a bit.
“Did I love them because they were the only boys in my life who consistently told me that I was beautiful? Probably. I loved The Ruperts for who they were, sure, but I mostly loved them for how they made me feel. Which was happy. The Ruperts made me happy. The simplest thing to be in the world. And the hardest.”
The one thing the unnamed narrator (she uses various 80s movies characters’ names as alias throughout the book: Sloane Peters, Diane Court, etc — but we never learn her real name) and her friends have in common is their love for the boy band called The Ruperts. They attend their concerts, discuss them on Tumblr, write fan fiction about them, and stalk them whenever possible. As the book opens, they’ve managed to secure a room at the same hotel where the boys are staying, hoping to get a glimpse of them. They get a lot more than a glimpse when one of the girls “accidentally” knocks out her favorite Rupert, and they basically end up kidnapping him.
It’s a fairly entertaining book, with some darkly humorous bits (kept reminding me of the movie Sugar & Spice) but the narrator’s constant vacillating between “this is wrong” and “but they’re my friends!” gets old fast. Then, like I said, it takes a distinctly fan fiction-y turn, becoming more little girl fantasy than actual plot. Trust me, I am not slagging on fan fiction. In fact, I have a somewhat embarrassing love of it. But I’ve never loved the stuff based on real people, or the stuff involving “original female character” — and this book lies firmly at the intersection of both. The author redeems it somewhat at the end, but not quite enough to lift this up from 3 stars.
