The Boyfriend

Better than the other book by McFadden I read, Never Lie, but still not a super great book. I think I'm just hard to please when it comes to mysterious thrillers.

We have two points of time represented in this book. Present day Sydney who broke up with her ex- and has been trying to put herself out there on a dating app and be not single because her biological clock is ticking, her mom is harping at her, and god she doesn't want to be old and single is the main focus. The story opens with her matching with Kevin, a creep who misrepresented himself on the app and keeps insinuating himself into Sydney's life, despite being kneed in the manlybits and not taking a hint from there. She has two friends, Bonnie whose scrunchies are part of her identity and nobody else on the planet wears scrunchies except Bonnie, and Gretchen who has an art exhibit at a museum and is dating the weird handyman in Sydney's apartment.

We also have past Tom in high school, who has a weird bug-obsessed friend named....something (I can't recall his real name, was it ever mentioned?), but everyone calls him Slug because he eats bugs. Tom has a crush on classmate Daisy, has an alcoholic and abusive father, and a weak mother who puts up with it all. He's also strangely obsessed with and gets excited by blood. We get chapters about Tom navigating his crush on Daisy, them becoming something adjacent to boyfriend/girlfriend in a clean hand holding sort of way, and Slug being awkward, while drama at school about a missing classmate escalates and makes Tom a person of interest.

Honestly I was way more invested in Tom's past chapters than I was in Sydney's chapters. I thought Sydney was an idiot who managed to surround herself with people waving all manner of red flags for a multitude of reasons. The degree she blinds herself to what's going on around her for the sake of sex with a Hot Guy is mind-boggling, actually, and the mental gymnastics she goes through to rationalize things after the fact is rather amazing. I realize most of what's going on around Sydney is the author's love of misdirection, but I feel like the main character should at least be mildly concerned about any number of things she doesn't seem to care about. It's wild.

Also, as a person who proudly wears scrunchies in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I'm rather offended at Sydney getting so hung up on the concept of people wearing scrunchies in today times. Everytime she came across one in the story, only Bonnie could have worn it, because Bonnie was the only person who would ever wear a scrunchie. It's inconceivable anyone else would, really. They're so dated. Jeez.

I thought the twist was unexpected though, even if the ending to it all was hard to believe. And it did keep me reading, so it's an entertaining read, if you can get past the main character being so dense.