The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West (Review)

Hello, lovelies! It’s Friday! 😀 Which means it is about to be weekend which means time for at a lot of reading (and probably also some school work if you are into that… but let’s just stay naive for a sec 😉 ) and other bookish stuff :))

Last Saturday I read the YA romance novel The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West. This book had been on my tbr for as long as I can remember. Luckily I discovered that my library had it and I took it as a sign to finally read it. And I am so glad that I did! I read it all in one day, which is a first for me considering its 300+ pages.

Minor spoiler: For those who have read the book, I just have to get some bitching done, before turning to my review. I do not care what Gia did – Jules was such a pain in the ass! Like what is your problem girl? Chill with the questioning! God, she annoyed me. *exhales. With that said, on to my review.

The Fill-In Boyfriend
Kasie West
346 pages
My rating ★★★

I am so happy that I finally decided to read this book. I loved everything about it. It was cute it was funny and with some seriousness as well. I know this book may be considered a total cliche: popular girl, doesn’t know who she is, boyfriend breaks up with her, she lies to her friends, meets new cute guy, resulting in new drama. Writing it like that makes it sound like a major cliche, I know. It may be, I don’t wanna go into that discussion now, but I just think that when you read a book like this (a YA romance novel) you should read it on the book’s and the story’s grounds. Accept it for what it is, and then just read it as a “guilty pleasure” if you don’t wanna take it too seriously. I did this, and I ended up really enjoying this book.

So what did I like about this book – everything! (Apart from Jules (a seriously annoying girl who pretends to be Gia’s friend) I liked Gia, I liked Gia and Bo’s meet cute(odd and wrong as it may be), I loved Gia and Bo and I loved Bo and his little sister Bec.

So let start with Gia. Even though she may have been snobby and self-absorbed I actually liked Gia from the beginning. When she first met Bo she had such a smart mouth which I found intriguing. I liked reading about her personal development caused by Bo and Bec. Reading about Gia’s discovery about who she was and who she wanted to be, was appealing. I liked that Gia was the student president (from where I come from the student president is rarely the “popular kid” but more often the enthusiastic and visionary one.) and not the captain of the cheer squad – now that would have been a cliche! 😀
Gia getting a fill-in boyfriend and lying about it was wrong. And as her father said: “lying is never the answer”. Her lie was ridiculous and stupid, but then meeting Juels I kind of got why she did it, haha. Still wrong move though. One thing that I didn’t like about Gia was that she didn’t come clean about her lie. She should have told her friends that she had lied to them and not let the lie be “discovered” by accident.  But if she hadn’t lied Gia would never have met Bo!

I loved Bo! He was such a cool and nice guy. And he was impulsive as well, something I really liked. I really liked the actor/drama thing he had going on. It was a nice change to finally see a guy being interested in culture and art and not in sports! One thing I didn’t like about Bo was his friends… yuk!
When you say Bo, you have to say Bec. Bo’s and Bec’s relationship as siblings gonna be goals. For real – they were such a nice team. And their mom, even cooler. But back to Bec. I liked Bec’s way of being straightforward. She really pushed Gia to think more of her actions and on how they affected and were interpreted by others. But Bec also had her flaws; ways of not being completely honest and judgmental.

I think this book showed in a fine way, that no one is perfect. No one is good or bad and everyone deserves a second chance. We are just humans and we screw up once in a while. But if you do it more than once you should maybe change your ways and try to be a better person.

The last thing I liked about this book was its critique of a new existing reality in the world of social media. People are looking for acceptance and validation through the number of followers and the number of likes. This was a nice touch to the book and a factor that pushed Gia for change even more than Bo and Bec (because it was a critique and a fact brought to her by her own brother.). But it isn’t just Gia who looks for acceptance through numbers for who we are. Everyone does it. Even book-bloggers does it. We think way too much about stats and views and visitors. I think it is an issue that everyone on social media is faced with. I hope that even more people would raise awareness concerning this and call for change. Let NO number define you! You are enough!

Happy Friday and happy reading!