Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

[jeannamichel]

This book was crazy. In a good way.

Four super fans infiltrate the hotel their favorite boy band, The Ruperts, are staying at for their New York tour. After they, accidentally, kidnap one of the boys, they begin to realize how society pressures teens to love boy bands. Being a fan is not all that is cracked up to be.

First, I want to take a moment and breathe because you may not get a chance to when you plunge into the crazy that is Kill the Boy Band. Kill the Boy Band was the strangest debut I’ve ever read. It may have been the craziest. And it most definitely is the boldest piece of work that has graced my bookshelf in a long time.

It starts out innocent enough. These four girls are the ultimate fans of The Ruperts, a band of four boys named Rupert. Each fan all have their own way of loving the band. And then they don’t. After accidentally kidnapping one of The Ruperts, things start getting weird. Kill the Boy Band becomes a slow progression of true ridiculousness (and I never said it was funny). A lot of reviews have said how Goldy Moldavsky’s book is hilarious. I find the book filled with dark humor but nothing close to hilarity.

The narrative is told by a girl who never tells readers her name. At first, I thought not disclosing the protagonist’s name was meant to prolong the mystery, similar to why E.K. Johnston did it in A Thousand Nights. Yet, the true message behind the unnamed protagonist and the whole plot was not as literal as I first thought. Kill the Boy Band, underneath the ridiculousness of kidnapping a boy band member, is the true colors of the boy band dynamic in society and how it’s a false representation of society itself.

A documentary about boy bands and the fangirls that love them inspired Goldy Moldavsky to create Kill the Boy Band. The unnamed main character’s narration begins asking questions about fans and to what lengths they will go to in order to see the boys of their dreams. In turn, readers begin asking the same thing. Kill the Boy Band encompasses readers’ mind, and cleverly inspires readers to look between the lines beyond the strange plot. Kill the Boy Band may be the boldest debut which tells us a message about our own society. Now all I ask you: do you want to kill the boy band or let it continue on?