The Duff by Kody Keplinger

The Duff (Hamilton High)

by Kody Keplinger

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper starts sleeping with Wesley Rush, a notorious womanizer who disgusts her, in order to distract her from her personal problems, and to her surprise, the two of them find they have a lot in common and are able to help each other find more productive ways to deal with their difficulties.

Reviewed by readingwithwrin on

2 of 5 stars

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2.75

“No matter where you go or what you do to distract yourself, reality catches up with you eventually.”

I did end up watching the movie first and while this did affect my opinion at first, after awhile I started to think of the book and the movie as two completely different things and enjoyed each of them for very different reasons.

For Bianca her finding out she was the DUFF empowered her in a way and was almost her downfall. She grabbed onto it and clung to it for a while, but she also used it as an excuse for doing certain things. While I did like that she owned up to her slut-shaming and how using Wesley for an escape wasn't the right thing to be doing. I disliked the fact that she just dropped her friends and stopped talking to them when it started to get rough in her family life. Especially when it came to things involving her dad.

Wesley was not a like-able character in the beginning. But as Bianca started liking him I did too and I realized that he had his own problems as well and used certain things as a form of escapism to plus he made a pretty good distraction for Bianca as well. He was also a lot smarter then people give him credit for.

As for Toby I never really liked him all that much. I did see the appeal of him for Bianca, but I mostly saw him as the person that she had been crushing on for so long that her feelings on him most likely wouldn't have still been the same as they were when she first started liking him.

Now I'm not going to lie I hated this book at first due to how Bianca acted in certain situations, how Wesley acted, and how they both escaped their problems. But after awhile I stopped hating it so much and realized that in some messed up way it actually worked and they did end up being better people. I'm also glad that I watched the movie first because I think without it I wouldn't have ever ended up reading this book.


Disclaimer: This book does contain sex and talk of sex but it is not graphic.


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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 6 July, 2015: Finished reading
  • 6 July, 2015: Reviewed