I read Fruit Fly for a book club and I saw Yellowface comp title and knew I had to read. This was an obsessive read that I breezed through once I got into it! It’s a story that asks about authenticity, lies, and stories. Keep reading this book review of Fruit Fly for my full thoughts.
Summary
Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.
Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.
Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.
But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Fruit Fly asks us who should tell a story. It’s about the layers of appropriation, of lying through our teeth, and lived experience. In the pressure pot of expectation and the desire to escape, Fruit Fly explores the pressure to be great before you’ve even begun. These layers of expectation our parents, our schools, society, puts on us. Fruit Fly doesn’t let any of its characters off the hook. With unreliable narrators abound, Silver’s book asks us about gilded cages, cages of our own making, and how we can escape. You aren’t sure who to believe as it oscillates between Mallory as she reveals how trapped she is – even though her life looks gilded.
And Leo who seems like the unproblematic victim until you see his own illusions and his own past. No one is uncomplicated. Both Leo and Mallory cannot escape from their past, from what they do out of desperation. And the lines between these two characters start to blur together especially by the ending. We can so desperately want to be someone else to escape and would do anything. Fruit Fly examines gratitude, truth, and stories. The stories we tell each other and ourselves. Is anything ever a truly altruistic act? What happens if we didn’t need to do it, if we had all the resources, everything available to us?
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There’s mind games, power moves, and plays in desperation. Fruit Fly blurs the line between reality and fiction. Between the lies we tell, the ones we embellish, and the truths we hide. Find Fruit Fly on Goodreads, Storygraph, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.