Review: The Fake Up

The Fake Up by Justin Myers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Flo(ria) is an upper middle-class girl with dreams of a musical career, working in her mother's vanity shop and gigging with an obnoxious sexist musician called Elijah. Dylan is a boy from a council estate with dreams of being an actor, meanwhile he's conducting Jack The Ripper tours of London by day and bartending at his BFF's bar at night. Flo and Dylan are madly in love but their lack of money and class differences cause huge amounts of strife, especially Flo's posh, patronising friends Estella and Barnaby who take every opportunity to put Dylan down. After Barnaby and Estella bring along a group of friends to one of Dylan's tours and infuriate him with their patronising 'advice' (and ask him to act for free in one of their grim webisodes for a sexist drink commercial), Dylan quits his job and he and Flo end up having a massive row.

Flo moves home and writes an angsty thinly-veiled song about their break-up which soons goes viral and leads to her becoming famous. Meanwhile, Dylan lands a role on a hospital soap opera playing a closeted bisexual doctor. Although they soon realise that their argument was silly, Flo and Dylan realise they need to stay broken up for their careers, so they pretend whilst secretly calling and texting each other. But when the tabloids and gossip mags are snapping pictures of Dylan with his costar, or Flo's agent wants her to fake-date a young artist who shared her first song on his social media, do they even know where the acting ends?

I have to take issue with the way this book is sold as A hilarious new rom-com with unforgettably brilliant characters. I didn't think this was hilarious, I didn't even think it was funny. Nor is it a rom-com. And the characters? Meh. Honestly I found both Dylan and Flo to be pretty unsympathetic and the 'antics' of the final chapters were completely left field and didn't fit with the narrative of the book to date.

Overall, I have to say that this book felt to me like the author came up with a great plot for a story and then didn't really care about any of the characters enough to make them likeable or believable. The writing was good and I liked the concept but I didn't care enough about the characters.

I was gifted this book by the publisher Little, Brown Book Group via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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