The Fill-In Boyfriend

The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West

Blurb:

When Gia Montgomery's boyfriend, Bradley, dumps her in the parking lot of her high school prom, she has to think fast. After all, she'd been telling her friends about him for months now. This was supposed to be the night she proved he existed. So when she sees a cute guy waiting to pick up his sister, she enlists his help. The task is simple: be her fill-in boyfriend – two hours, zero commitment, a few white lies. After that, she can win back the real Bradley.

The problem is that days after prom, it's not the real Bradley she's thinking about, but the stand-in. 

Review:

"You know what we've succeeded in going with this game?"
"What's that?"
"Increasing the anticipation."
He laughed. "I know, right? Can I just be fill-in Bradley forever?"

The Fill-In Boyfriend is exactly what I've come to expect from a Kasie West book (which is great because it totally served its purpose) but nothing more. I actually started reading this book as a "treat" after a stressful weekend with lots of swimming and trying to read Orlando (by Virginia Woolf) last-minute (the idea was that if I managed to finish Orlando on my 3h train-ride back home from the course-thingy I attended I was allowed to start reading The Fill-In Boyfriend. I finished Orlando 23min from my destination!) but it turned into a "I'm addicted to this and I can't stop now"-book which I continued to read until 4 am and there was no more book to read. Soo… it worked out all right, I'd say?

The thing is: Kasie West's magic always works on me. I don't know why, I don't know how but it does without fail (so far) that means that her stories always tug at my heart-string and always make me feel the echoes of the butterflies flapping about in her protagonist's bellies. I'm always endeared by how sweet and light-hearted her stories are, how they make me forget the whole world and allow me to just dive head-first into the lives of people currently falling in love. There is a simple and powerful pleasure in that which I just can't stay away from for too long. (In fact, I'm already looking forward to reading By Your Side by her as soon as it's available.)

However, apart from the whole "I just love how West makes me feel things"-thing, there were a couple of things I didn't like about this book and a lot that I pretty much just glossed over because I didn't want to ruin the emersion (like, Gia must have been pretty freaking horrible for a pretty freaking long time - I found her likeable enough once the story started but, oh my, she often sounds like a pretty terrible person). Some of those things are: Jules (why does she do it? What is she never really called out for it?), the pacing is off in the beginning (meeting fill-in Bradley and falling for him overlap pretty hard), fill in Bradley just wasn't that interesting (? I'm more sad than anything else about this one), and a lot more that I'm not going to name (because of spoilers) or can't think of right now (and also space reasons).

That being said: I enjoyed this book a lot, obviously, I mean I did stay awake just to finish it until 4 am after I've been swimming for 4-6 hours a day the previous two days (it wasn't hard just draining being in water for that long) and feeling like I was about to pass out right when I came home. It's just not the kid of book I can recommend easily due to a greater number of problems than I usually have with West's books.

Rating:

Just like all the other Kasie West books I've reviewed before, I'll give this a 3 out of 5 stars, however, if I had to list all these books according to which one I liked best this one would be at the bottom of the pile.

Details:

Name: The Fill-In Boyfriend

Deutscher Titel: Liebe ist die schönste Naturkatastrophe der Welt (wow :'D - in case you don't understand German this translates into: "love is the most beautiful natural disaster in the world")

Author: Kasie West

Publisher: Harper Teen

Pages: 346 (I read this as ebook and, honestly, it does not feel like that long a book and rather, just as all other Kasie West books, like it's about 200 pages long with a decently large font)