Stranger Than Fanfiction

by Chris Colfer

[justine_manzano]

I really wanted to like this book, as I love Chris Colfer, and I won this book for free, so I wanted to be able to give him a nice review. But…damn.

Stranger Than Fanfiction is an interesting concept. Four super fans go for a road trip at the end of their senior year of high school and their favorite actor decides to go along with them. 

Unfortunately, it is in the execution where this fails. While Colfer is often clever in his narration, his writing is relatively bland. We are told many things about the characters, but we are rarely shown them and when we are, the showing is very heavy-handed. The road trip sounds like it should be a fun story conceit, but it actually just feels like a series of episodes this group goes through, and an excuse for every character to confide their secrets in the actor.

The characters read as being very immature. They are also a diversity smorgasbord, which would be awesome, if they didn’t feel so flat and like such stereotypes. There’s Topher, the straight cis white guy, who serves as a savior to his disabled brother who really doesn’t even have a character. There’s Joey who is black and gay, and whose journey is reduced to a PSA on why you shouldn’t have casual sex. There’s Sam, assigned female, but a transgender male, whose journey is reduced as a comparison to Cash, the actor, who feels like he’s always acting. Also, Sam serves as a vehicle to inform people about being transgender and we only really get the feeling of his story in the chapter that introduces him, which is actually a strong chapter. If the author had spent more time telling the rest of the story the way he did that chapter, he might have had something. And then there’s Mo, an Asian-American girl whose father is super strict, which is…WOW…such a stereotype.

As a member of a few fandoms, this book paints fandom in such a negative light, and Cash serves solely as a way for Colfer to express his displeasure with fandom and with fame-culture. This is pretty annoying given the fact that he has profited so completely off this culture.

The whole story leads up to a twist that I guessed before the end of Chapter 1. In the end, this was a huge let down. Two stars just for the humorous situations, but this isn’t the kind of story that stays with you.