The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend

Wow, did all the other reviewers here read the same book that I did?I mean, I suppose I have nothing but good things to say about Kody Keplinger herself. I've looked at her blog and her website, and she's obviously smart, witty, and personable. She's a gifted writer - "The Duff" was accepted for publication when she was seventeen years old! - and I especially envy her ability to create a relatable, (mostly) realistic protagonist who isn't just a fictionalized version of herself. I'm excited to see how she develops as a writer in the future. Her second novel, "Shut Out," a modern high-school version of Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," is definitely on my to-read list, and I'm even intrigued by the published plot description for "Lying Out Loud," a semi-sequel "companion" to "The Duff" coming out later this year.That said, I can't honestly recommend "The Duff," at least not to anyone within its target audience. I can't discuss why without getting into some pretty heavy spoilers eventually - some of the most problematic content appears on literally the last page of the novel - so be forewarned.The novel opens with the protagonist, Bianca Piper, sipping a Cherry Coke and watching her friends dance at a local teen hotspot, when Wesley Rush, "the most disgusting womanizing playboy to ever darken the doorstep of Hamilton High," approaches her to start a conversation. She assumes he's hitting on her, and she isn't the least bit interested: she's far too sensible and cynical to want anything to do with this arrogant, promiscuous creep - even if he does have "the body of a Greek god." However, it turns out he really *does* just want to chat. He informs her that "every group of friends has a weak link, a Duff," the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. "You, darling, are the Duff," he continues. "Girls - like your friends - find it sexy when guys show some sensitivity and socialize with the Duff. So by talking to you right now I am doubling my chances of getting laid tonight. Please assist me here, and just pretend to enjoy the conversation." To her credit, Bianca promptly stands up and throws the rest of her drink on him, then grabs her friends and leaves the club in a hurry. The next day, however, her friends want to go dancing again, and Bianca agrees to come along just to distract herself from the drama of her recovering-alcoholic father and increasingly-absent mother and their obviously crumbling marriage. When Wesley makes a second attempt to use her to impress her friends, she kisses him, apropos of nothing, for no discernible reason, and her mind goes blank: "All of my thoughts vanished, and I became a sort of physical being. Emotions disappeared. Nothing existed but our bodies, and our warring lips were at the center of everything. It was bliss. It was amazing not to think." Afterwards, she is disgusted with herself. She is horrified when their English teacher assigns him as her partner for an assignment, but then her mother serves her father with divorce papers and he goes on a bender. Naturally, when Bianca goes over to Wesley's house to work on their essay, she pounces on him almost before they've had time to discuss a topic to write about. Wesley obligingly pulls out a condom. "When it was over, I felt dirty. I felt like I'd done something wrong and shameful, but at the same time, I felt good. Alive. Free. Wild. My mind was totally cleared, like someone had hit the refresh button. I knew the euphoria wouldn't last forever, but the filthy regret was worth the momentary escape." I'm pretty sure she meant to say that the momentary escape was worth the filthy regret, but at any rate, as her father starts holing up in his bedroom and missing work, she finds herself more in need of distraction than ever, and before long she's ditching the friends who genuinely care about her to slip off to Wesley's house three or four times a week.This can't end well. I don't mean this might not end well, or this probably won't end well. I mean this CAN'T END WELL. Except that it does. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that Wesley is a sensitive guy under his arrogant posturing. You see, his parents are never home and his grandmother disapproves of his promiscuity, so he has a really hard life too, just like Bianca! And it turns out he's a really great listener, and he cares and he understands Bianca better than anyone and HELLO, this is NOT a sweet guy with just enough of a sexy bad-boy streak to create misunderstandings. This is a character who can't understand why the girl he just got through calling fat and ugly might not be particularly interested in facilitating his sex life. Even after they start getting to know each other a little better, he calls her "Duffy" more often than he uses her actual name. "You're pretty sexy when you're pissed at me, Duffy," he teases her, and although I can't decide whether that's a step up or a step down from describing an angry woman as "cute," I'm shocked that a self-proclaimed feminist writer would put such a sentiment in the mouth of her protagonist's romantic interest. What next, is he going to tell Bianca to go make him a sandwich? And lest you think that Keplinger meant to show Wesley coming to an awareness of the value of women as actual human beings, it's made explicitly clear on the last page that he hasn't. When Bianca informs Wesley, her newly-official boyfriend, that he is never to call her "Duffy" ever again, Wesley thinks to apologize for the first time: "I'm sorry. I didn't know how much it hurt you. I should never have called you the Duff in the first place. I didn't know you then." He couldn't possibly have anticipated that a young woman might find it unpleasant to be saddled with a nickname implying she's unattractive? Then again, he seems to think that whether he knows a girl, or whether he likes her, is the determining factor in whether it's appropriate to address a girl the way he addressed Bianca in the opening chapter. I'll grant that by the time I was about halfway through the book, my feelings toward Wesley had changed from wanting him to suffer a horrible lingering death to wishing I could punch him in the face and deliver a stern lecture, but that's as far as he ever managed to redeem himself in my eyes.This relationship is sick. Bianca knows it and struggles with it. Even Wesley seems to know it on some level, although he doesn't seem to care. Bianca repeatedly describes sex with Wesley as an intoxicant, an addiction. She keeps their hookups secret from her friends, turns to him more and more as time passes, loathes him but finds herself counting down the hours until her next "fix." Eventually, she decides it's time to face her problems head-on instead of distracting herself from them, which means "quitting Wesley. Unfortunately, there were no weekly meetings, no sponsors, or twelve-step programs for what I was addicted to." (On a side note, how on earth did this novel get into print without once passing under the eyes and pen of someone who knows how Alcoholics Anonymous actually works? They don't have "weekly meetings." Many recovering alcoholics, even those who have years of sobriety under their belts, attend several meetings a week. Bianca's father, getting back into the program after falling off the wagon, would probably find it essential to go *every day*.) The suggestion that a healthy romance could arise from such beginnings as this is problematic in itself, and to suggest that it could happen without both partners seriously and consciously committing to making some huge and difficult changes is downright irresponsible. Then again, Keplinger doesn't even try to sell this as a healthy relationship, even within her protagonist's own private thoughts. "We were both pretty [screwed] up," Bianca reflects of herself and Wesley in the second-to-last paragraph of the novel. "Somehow, though, that made everything more exciting. Yeah, it was sick and twisted, but that's reality, right? Escape is impossible, so why not embrace it?" That goes beyond problematic and irresponsible. That crosses the line into downright dangerous.There's a good message somewhere in all this, a message about self-worth and openness and how even the people who seem to have it all together struggle with insecurities of their own. However, these positive messages were drowned out for me by the glorification of an unhealthy relationship. I could go on - I could discuss at some length the implications that sexual chemistry is more important to a satisfactory relationship than mutual respect. I could point out that, whereas Kirkus Reviews is probably quite accurate that "The Duff" portrays "a complex, enemies-with-benefits relationship that the YA market has never seen before," the "special snowflake/reformed rake" and "I can't stand you but I can't keep my hands off you" tropes have been staples of the trashy-romance genre for decades and really are better off staying there in the realm of fantasy rather than being served up to impressionable kids (let's be honest, there are a lot more eleven-year-olds than seventeen-year-olds who want to read a story about high school) in a novel reviewers have described as "honest." Still, I think I've said enough. It doesn't give me any great pleasure to point out the dangerous messages in a novel, written by such an amazing young author, which so many young people have claimed helped them triumph over their insecurities with confidence. I hope Kody Keplinger will continue to write, and to be read, for many decades to come, and that someday "The Duff" will be remembered only as an awkward but crucial artifact in her development.

OMG! Like you've got to read this book. Like it changed my life. Like , I mean you know! JK!Actually this book wasn't anything like that. It was a great book filled with wonderful characters and had a great storyline. Bianca or B as she is called is sarcastic, secretive and surprising. That combination makes a great character, but combine it with a story line that goes up and down and set in high school and it makes for a great story. Casey is B's best friend, an amazon at 6'1" next to B's 5'2" and B considers her to be as beautiful as if she'd just stepped off the cover of teen Vogue. Casey is always making B open up about what's wrong when B would rather just bottle things up. So whenever she says, "Every thing's fine." Casey warns her closest friends that means she's lying. Jessica, the third in their trio of friends is blond and beautiful according to B and tends to look at life just a little too optimistically for B. She's a realist. She has to be because life at home isn't exactly rosy. Her mom, a motivational speaker, has been gone for two months and she and her dad don't talk about it. She sees the handwriting on the wall, but her dad pretends all is well until the divorce papers show up in the mail.B is kind of like the designated driver in this book, though the girls don't drink. They go to a teen club called "The Nest" where she sits at the bar and drinks Cherry Cokes and talks to the thirty year old bartender, Joe. She watches her friends dance the night away, never joining in. She keeps herself from having fun it seems on purpose, setting herself apart from those who are having fun. She seems to enjoy her misery even when her friends come out of the crowed and ask her to join them. Then, the hated Wesley Rush plops down beside her and tells her she's the DUFF. She has no idea what that is until he tells her she's the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. Soon, Wesley is wearing Cherry Coke all over himself while B's sharp tongue tells him where to go and what to do with himself. She is so angry she makes her friends leave early and when she explains she got in a fight with him, they both sigh like he's the hottest boy in town. Which unfortunately he is, though B calls him a man whore. She neglects to tell them about the DUFF part of the conversation and Casey teases her endlessly about liking him. But, the next time they're at the Nest, Wesley takes the same seat and pisses her off again and things are so bad at home that for some reason, she kisses him. She only stops when his hand strays a little too high and then she slaps him hard. But she realizes when she's kissing him she can't think about her problems and he becomes, in the author's words "like a drug" to her.B and Wesley's relationship becomes more complicated as her home life becomes more complicated. Her father begins drinking again and he is a mean drunk, though she only sees this once. Wesley and B are assigned an English project together and have to work on it at his house since her father is drinking and unpredictable. She finds out things about his home life that make them have more in common than she realized. She continues to visit him even after the paper is turned in and keeps the "relationship" a secret from Casey and Jessica. Things become more complicated when Jessica's brother comes home because he and B were involved at one time before she and Casey were friends with Jessica. Then Toby Tucker, B's long time crush suddenly asks her out and she begins dating him, but she can't stop comparing him to Wesley. And throughout the whole story, Wesley calls B the insulting name of Duffy and doesn't realize it hurts her every time he uses it.Things get even more complicated for B when her mom returns to confront her father, meet Toby, and then Toby, Casey and Jessica all go to the Nest together. She's sure Wesley will be there and she's not sure how to handle it. For once in her life, she doesn't know what to do. The unflappable B, is a bundle of nerves because even though she doesn't want to admit it, she has feelings for Wesley, not love, "because romantic love takes years upon years to build upon." And why would Wesley Rush, rich, handsome, a guy who could have any girl in the school, want her? After all, he thinks of her as the DUFF.As far as the characters go, I think they were developed just enough so that we could see them and then they told their own story. Some weren't very developed, but then they didn't lend much to the story so they didn't need to be, like the best friends. They were just side dishes to the main course.I loved this book! I think Kody Keplinger should not go to college but keep writing. I think she will have her imagination drained if she goes to college and she's got a great imagination. The book jacket says she's eighteen and attending Ithaca college. I hope she makes enough to buy a house, a cozy little writing shack and continue writing. She doesn't need college when she can write like this!Now, that being said, this is definitely for older teens definitely high school at least 16 or older. There is a lot of sex, but not graphic at all. A lot of swearing but not gratuitous. It's just the way this character is. And the issues of divorce and an alcoholic parent are touched on, not really a lesson on how to deal with it.

Although the premise for the book is an impressive and extremely relatable one, the fact remains that the writer seems to have missed her own point. The DUFF is not the "ugly one" in a friend group, but instead a concept that everyone falls into. The idea that someone actually is a DUFF isn't possible because everyone sees their own flaws and others imperfections, and therefore always believes that they are the DUFF of the group. Therefore making Bianca plus sized and "plain" whilst her friends and stunningly tall and slim defeats the purpose. Perhaps if the book swapped narrator's at some point and looked into Jessica's or Casey's self confidence and showed how they all believe they are the DUFF I would have more confidence in the book and appreciate the theme more effectively. Lots of love, a fellow DUFF

At the beginning of this book we're introduced to Bianca and her two friends Casey & Jessica who are described as two gorgeous blondes. Bianca however is called the duff or Duffy by Wesley the 'hot guy from school' who is also a 'man whore' trying to get into her friends pants. Later we find out that Bianca is going through some family problems as is Wesley and the two, despite constantly bickering, find solace in each other.I really did enjoy this book the best part for me was the relationships between the characters, they were so real and you could easily identify with Bianca, she is a normal teenager who lives a normal teenage life and while her story isn't action packed a lot of girls could probably relate to her.I liked ALL the characters in this book, Kody just has a way of making all the people in this book seem realistic. The only thing that irritated me was the way Bianca would bottle everything up and push away her friends. Also I was a bit annoyed at how hard everyone was on Wesley he was constantly referred to as a man slut or man whore but there was no evidence of him being like that in the book. He didn't once sleep with anyone else, he didn't even kiss anyone bar Bianca. In fact I found him to be quite charming and attentive if slightly cocky and arrogant. I liked how each character was human and made mistakes it just made the book very real.I loved Kody's writing style as it was so easy to read and it just flowed naturally, the dialogue was spot on and realistic.I gave this book 4 stars out of 5 but really I only rate it 3.5 stars because although it is a great book it's very similar to a lot of other books in the YA genre.

So, I’ve read the first 60 pages of this book, and the main character is so annoying. Does she fancy Wesley Rush? As indicated by snogging his face off every time she needs a distraction. Or does she hates him? Like she adamantly claims? She also annoys me how much she bottles everything up. I'm sat here screaming, "just tell him!" If I wasn’t so stubborn, I might have even considered giving up on the book, but I had to know what happened. Then as I get further into the story, and I finish it in one sitting, my opinion changes. This isn't the best book I've ever read, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were moments when I was actually laughing out loud, or pulling a shocked face (much to the amusement of the guy sitting opposite me on the train), and there were moments when I was actually infuriated. Bianca, our main character, finally starts dating the guy of her dreams, and realises that he isn't all she thought he would be. Yes he was sweet, kind, and forever complimenting her, but she just didn't feel that passion. Isn't this something we might all have experienced? Haven't most of us at some point in our lives dated someone because we thought they were too nice to say no to?I found this book to be a bit of a typical teenage story. Friends fall out, they have crushes on people, and they struggle with their sexuality. But this book also delved deeper, all families have their own problems. Wesley feels abandoned by his family and his sister and grandmother are disgusted with his overtly sexual lifestyle. Casey’s father had divorced her mother and then never bothered with her again. Bianca’s father battled with alcoholism. Jessica was bullied. Aren't these all very realistic problems that people deal with everyday? Within the first 60 pages I would have said this story was a glorified version of Mean Girls, but then it deals with so many issues that many young-adult stories often avoid. This book is dark; no one likes to accept that teenagers deal with these problems – most of the time alone. But at the same time, there is a lesson here that as long as you are open with your family and friends, , you can find comfort and support to help deal with these issues. I found this book very heartwarming, and as much as Bianca’s interior monologue annoyed me at times, the other times it was very amusing and relatable. Bianca brings a lightheartedness feeling about this book, which explains why people have enjoyed this book so much.The Hamilton High series is not one that I shall be completing. I enjoyed this book very much, but there is so much high school/friendship/family drama I need to be reading about. The authors writing style is possibly what does make this book enjoyable; the sarcastic interior monologue, the depth of the main characters and how we discover all about their different lives rather than just that of Bianca. However I would say that this book is missing is conflict. Yes Jessica was bullied, Bianca and Casey briefly fall out, and Wesley is rude, but where is the “I hate such and such” and the competition among the girls at high school? The high school experience isn't just about making lots of friends and finding a boyfriend, there is often a lot of conflict between girls, wether this is over a boy, or just because kids can be cruel. It is briefly touched upon when Bianca steals Wesley away from a group of girls and she is chastised, but this could have added a whole new aspect of the story. That is what I think is missing from this story. Apart from that I have (mostly) nothing but praise, and I am really glad I read this book. I would quickly recommend this to my friends and to anyone else, just because it is a reminder that people aren't always what they seem, who knows what happens behind closed doors.

I've been looking at this book for about a year or so and after reading A Midsummer's Nightmare and loving it, I felt more inclined to buy this, so when I saw it was on offer at Amazon for 99p yesterday I bought it straight away.And I was NOT disappointed!I think it's fair to say that I am a fan of Kody Keplinger.I started this a few hours ago and more or less devoured it. I really liked it! I just got really into it, I liked the characters; I fell hard for Wesley! I liked the plot, I liked how supportive her friends were because in a lot of books they can be two-faced b*tches.I'm looking forward to reading more of the author's books.

Both the movie and the book are good but very different.The book is more raw than the movie and realistic. It doesn't have any of the hollywood tropes and so I enjoyed thatThe characters and romance was more nuanced and I also enjoyed that more. It was less surface level and more complicated.