Book Review: The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West

The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West

Book Description (From Amazon):
When Gia Montgomery's boyfriend, Bradley, dumps her in the parking lot of her high school prom, she decides to do the unthinkable…convince the cute guy waiting to pick up his sister to pretend to be her boyfriend for the night. The task is simple: two hours, zero commitment, a few white lies.

The problem is that days after prom, she can't stop thinking about her fill-in boyfriend. But can Gia turn her fake boyfriend into a real one without exposing her lie and possibly destroying her friendships and her newfound relationship?

Smartly observed and wonderfully romantic, Kasie West's talent shines in this tale of one girl's unexpected quest to find love…and possibly herself.

My thoughts:
Gia Montgomery is All That. She is put together. She’s popular, president of the student body, the leader of her posse, dating a junior in UCLA. But all of that will start to unravel on prom night.

What she discovers about herself is that she really doesn’t know herself at all, can’t have an opinion that is not validated by her friends and everyone else, pushes hurtful things to the back of her mind where she forgets about them instead of dealing with them and can’t cause any waves to the perfect family her parents have constructed.

Truth be told, Gia made me angry and there was no way I would have wanted to be friends with her when I was in high school. She’s not a mean girl per se, but she is by association, but not standing up for what is right and not censuring her so-called friends when they are cruel. She expects the world to be handed to her and it is.

But that was before Prom. Before Bradley dumped her. To illustrate her character, she was happier that he looked incredibly hot so she could make her friends jealous that she was to see him. And when he dumped her, she was more indignant about the fact that he did it before the prom and not after so she could show him off, but that is exactly why he dumped her.

She was shallow, selfish and obnoxious. But that was before Hayden.

After Bradley dumped her, she saw Hayden sitting in his car reading. She went over to his car and basically demanded he take her to the Prom, to stand in for her date, and felt like she was doing him a favor. At first, he was resistant to her pleas, but something about her swayed him. So, he went home, changed into a suit and came back to the school to be her date, but not as himself. She wanted him to pretend to be Bradley.

Gia just couldn’t face her friends if she had to tell them the truth. They didn’t really believe she had a boyfriend at UCLA and she was afraid that if she didn’t show up with Bradley after talking about him for the past few months, they would not believe he existed. And she was afraid of losing her friends.
So she told a lie. She had never even found out Hayden’s real name, so in her mind, she called him Fill-In Bradley. Hayden’s performance was flawless. He really turned on the charm and wowed her friends, but her one friend, Jules, was determined to get any dirt she could.

Jules kept prying, trying to dig up information. Anything inconsistent in Gia’s stories Jules would jump right on. And it wasn’t just prom, it was all the time. She was constantly trying to discredit Gia every chance she got, to steal away Gia’s best friend.

So in order to protect her friendships, she didn’t tell them what happened with Bradley and lied about who Hayden was. There was more trouble as Hayden’s sister goes to Gia’s school and was at the prom and she was not happy about the charade. In order to cover up why he was talking to her when Gia’s friends were watching from a distance, he made it seem as if he had been cheating on Gia and that she broke up with him.

Once he left the prom, Gia thought that would be the end of it, but she couldn’t stop thinking about him and was curious as to why he agreed to help her in the first place. She obsessed about it all weekend long. Come Monday morning at school, she finds that Hayden’s sister, Bec, is actually in one of her classes. When she tries to enlist Bec’s aid to help her get in touch with Hayden, Bec refuses. But aid comes in the most unlikely of ways.

Bec enlists Gia’s help to be a Fill-In date for Hayden to a graduation party given by his ex-girlfriend. The girl played head games and cheated on him, but Bec is afraid Hayden may want her back. So she coerces Gia to help telling her that Gia owes Hayden, but Gia readily agrees because she wants to understand his motives for helping her and closure.

But things rarely go according to plan and turn out the way they are planned and Bec finds herself entangled in all the lines she’s told to her friends, her family, but mostly to herself. When’s she’s perpetrated the lies for so long, is she even able to come clean and can a fake relationship turn into the real thing?