Review: The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend by Kody Keplinger

The Duff: Designated Ugly Fat Friend
Kody Keplinger {Blog | Facebook | Twitter}
Publisher: Little Brown/Poppy
Publication Date: September 7, 2010
Audio Book {8 hrs}
Source: Public Library
Genre: Young Adult
Characters: Bianca Piper, Wesley Rush, Toby Tucker
Challenge: 100+, Whisper Stories
My Rating:

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn’t think she’s the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She’s also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her “the Duff,” she throws her Coke in his face.

But things aren’t so great at home right now, and Bianca is desperate for a distraction. She ends up kissing Wesley. Worse, she likes it. Eager for escape, Bianca throws herself into a closeted enemies-with-benefits relationship with him.

Until it all goes horribly awry. It turns out Wesley isn’t such a bad listener, and his life is pretty screwed up, too. Suddenly Bianca realizes with absolute horror that she’s falling for the guy she thought she hated more than anyone.

From the beginning of this book, I instantly liked Bianca. She was me. The tag-along friend that’s sitting at the bar while everyone else is on the dance floor. Bianca is every girl at some point in their lives.

Bianca is the less attractive one of her friends, but she never realized it until Wesley pointed it out to her. Wesley is the high school playboy that will sleep with anything with a pulse, and he happens to have his eyes set on either one of Bianca’s BFFs.

The two are thrown together at the local teen nightclub, The Nest, when Wesley approaches her in an effort to get close to one of her prettier friends. So when Bianca starts going through some difficult things in her home life, she never expected Wesley to be the one she turned to, to get through it. She starts using him for sex as a way to escape, and Wesley being Wesley, he was oh so happy to oblige.

What started out as just a distraction for her, quickly turned into something more. But to her Wesley could never be interested in more than sex with her, because she’s The DUFF.

I really enjoyed the relationship between these two. When they weren’t fighting with each other they were having sex. The bickering between them, mostly from Bianca, and the banter, was hilarious to watch.

Wesley was totally misunderstood throughout most of the novel. Bianca was the only one that seemed to see the true Wesley underneath the playboy image. It was heartbreaking to see her walk away from Wesley in favor of Toby.

On the other hand, it was nice to see Wesley and Bianca falling in love with each other and not be the typical teenagers who are desperately in love. Some young adult novels are too un-relatable and unbelievable to even bother with. But this one was so relatable in the fact that Bianca could be any of us.

I will definitely have to get my own copy of this one for my keeper shelf. It was a great read!

Read by Ellen Grafton
Duration: 8 hours

Brillance Audio

The narrator did a wonderful job of capturing a youthful voice without being annoying or whiny. I have many incomplete ya audio books because I couldn’t deal with the voices of the narrator. Whiny and annoying are not the best traits to take on to express the youthfulness of the characters.