Fruit Fly: A Novel

This book was soo good!!!

This is truly a dark novel where both main characters are untrustworthy, unlikeable and deeply troubled by their social angst. The book starts off with a writer trying to confront her writer's block by invading the life of a stranger, who is just as eager to use her back. Bouncing between the narrative of each character, the book shows the honest thoughts and thinking process of these calculating duo and their toxic relationship that build and become co-dependent to. The delusion and deception is what makes this book so dark yet drawing to see how it plays out. This book would be a great book club read as it covers so many topics and damaging characters.

Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly is an overly long, dull narrative that could have made its point a few hundred pages earlier. It’s not exploitative. It’s not offensive. It’s not controversial. It’s just boring.

What did I like? I liked how the chapters were written very distinctly different between the perspectives of Mallory and Leo. I also liked how the story was set in London and the use of British slang by Leo. The strongest chapters in the book were certainly the first few. Those chapters had great social commentary on trauma porn and queer storytelling in literature. The book made its point so quickly and early that I wondered what else the book was going to explore in the remaining hundreds of pages.

What did I not like? The middle portion of the book dragged and lacked clear focus. While the main characters were unlikable, they were also just uninteresting. I don’t mind unlikable protagonists, but they have to also have more layers and dimensions to them. Mallory and Leo were just too one-dimensional and underdeveloped.

I also despised the constant references to pop cultural icons. You could have a drinking game for how many times the book name-dropped Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, and various other celebrities. It was so unnecessary. I don’t mind pop cultural references in a book here and there, but I always worry that such a repetitive use of those references will make the book very dated in the long run. So it loses its timeless value.

The ending was also pretty silly. It felt like an ending for a thriller novel written by Freida McFadden. It was hinting so hard at a potential sequel, but honestly I don’t need it. No thank you. Just give us the check, please.

The book was just too long for its own sake. Which caused many readers to DNF it. A queer satire of this kind desperately needed a shorter page length. Like Isha Raya’s You'll Never Forget Me (2026). I really enjoyed that novel because it was short, sweet, and to the point.

I do not recommend Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly. It was just disappointing. Even as an entry into the satirical thriller literary subgenre, it was not comedic or thrilling. All this online hype for a book so mediocre. It’s pretty sad, innit?

Fruit Fly had me going from “WTF?” to “I can’t flip these pages fast enough.” I was uneasy pretty much the whole time, but completely hooked. I thought the author did such a good job building the characters and creating this gritty, unsettling atmosphere. The themes of mental health and addiction added so much to the tension and made the story feel even more intense. Definitely dark, gritty, suspenseful, and a book that kept me guessing how it would all pull together.