Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.

A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

Believe the hype on this one. It’s totally the gripping, sometimes uncomfortable and cringe inducing, often tense and sometimes hilarious read that everyone claims it is. I could not put it down.

Mallory is a novelist who hasn’t had a real hit in seven years and is desperate to claw her way back into relevance before her career completely fades out. She decides to “go gay” (because gay lit is relevant – especially if it’s tragic and written by someone who isn’t at all gay) and crosses paths with Leo, a young man struggling with addiction and homelessness. The perfect inspiration for her next bestseller. He’s vulnerable, he’s got a compelling story, and probably easy to manipulate into telling her everything about him so she can profit off of it. Convinced she’s doing the right thing, Mallory starts down a path that gets more complicated and more damaging the further she goes, until secrets begin to unravel at a pace she can’t keep up with, threatening to blow up a lot more than just her book deal.

I’ve seen people describing this as “Yellowface but make it gay”, and I get where that comparison comes from, but this book absolutely stands on its own two feet. What really struck me is how much this book has to say about straight, cisgender white women writing gay stories purely for profit without any real investment in getting them right. There’s a real distinction the book draws between genuine allyship and the kind of self perceived allyship that’s really just self interest wearing a supportive mask, and it makes that point without ever stopping to spell it out directly for the reader. It trusts you to see it happening in real time as Mallory makes one bad (and very exploitative) decision after another.

I’m someone who fully believes in the importance of visibility and think gay stories absolutely need to be told. But I also think it’s a genuine problem that more straight women have published books about gay men than gay men have. Our stories deserve to come from people actually living them, not from someone who only sees our pain or our sex lives as literature-worthy. Telling a story just because it sells isn’t allyship, and this book makes that point loud and clear by showing exactly what happens when Mallory tries to have it both ways.

Pacing wise, this book moves fast and never lets up. The tension builds steadily as Mallory digs herself deeper, and as Leo catches on to what she’s up to. Watching the consequences of everything Mallory sets in motion finally catch up with her was deeply satisfying. She gets exactly what she deserves by the end, and there’s something almost cathartic about watching that unfold page by page.

If you want a sharp, sometimes uncomfortable, and often funny book that isn’t afraid to bite back, this is absolutely worth picking up. I’ll be coming back to this one again.