4.5 stars

I love that this book combined Lord of the Flies with the dumpster fyre (lol) that was Fyre Fest. It was a funny, but sad look at the importance we put into our social media & how far we would go to maintain our followers/engagement.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

“You work here, right?”

- Rafi is already off to a bad start because she purchased the overpriced, loud t-shirt merch that the Fly Fest sold on their website. She stands out and not in a good way, which seems to be a theme throughout the book.

“Now let’s see how deranged things get.”

- Influencers, beauty gurus, and a rockstar stuck on an island without internet, what could go wrong? And if someone happens to have access and willing to share for a price? Oooo this could get ugly. LOL

“Let’s be honest, we all look like pigs…”

-I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some really gross things that some of the influencers do and it made me laugh out loud and then shake my head in disgust. It just shows you how far people are willing to go to be popular/relevant and to not have to admit their mistakes.

More of a satyrical thriller than a horror story? It was horrendous to watch these kids act the way they did - selfish, self absorbed, pompous, ignorant in a situation that they were in, However, I did not find the love I did in the debut novel of this author. This felt like a burn book on the influencers.

Thank you to PRH audio and Penguin Teen for my review copy. All opinions are my own.

I loved the premise, but the execution fell flat for me. I think that maybe I was expecting something different given the comp titles.

What I liked:

I enjoyed the podcast excerpts sprinkled in (I'm a huge podcast person).

What I didn't like:

One thing that sticks out for me is the way the MC is one of those teens who are basically off the grid social media-wise, and for a podcaster, I find that unbelievable. The I'm-not-like-other-girls feel was too much for me. The harping on social media influencers was also over the top. A lot of influencers do stuff just for the free stuff, sure, but people like me, like to help authors get their books out there and if there happens to be a free book offered, I'm taking it. Some influencers are out there doing good, especially bookstagrammers and booktokkers.

The plot was all over the place. Just when I thought there was the main theme, another side plot gets thrown in or the main plot gets thrown out altogether. The mystery of who the killer was really made my brain melt.

While I don't think I got the entire point of this book, I think others might enjoy the mystery and the pop culture references.

In “Lord of the Fly Fest”, we follow Rafi who has a True-Crime Podcast. She wants something really special for one of her episodes, so she decides to go to the Fly Fest where her next subject for the podcast is headliner. However, she soon discovers that danger is near …

I liked that this book was taking a different turn than what I was expecting of it. It was a real fun story, but you have to be aware of the fact that social media might get a bit ridiculized in “Lord of the Fly Fest”. So be prepared for it before picking this book to be your next read.

While I found it funny and loved the representation in the book, I unfortunately still had some troubles with the book. I can’t really say what it was, maybe the fact that I don’t really know what happened at that Fyre Festival or the fact that it took me longer to read than what I expected? Honestly, I couldn’t say.

The writing style however was great, and I loved all the little puns throughout the book.

Overall, if you loved Lord of the Flies, you should read this!

“Their makeup did not make them beautiful anymore. Rafi knew now that it made them savages.”

Wow. Now this was a crazy ride for a YA Thriller. Rafi finds herself stranded on an island with a slew of social media influencers. With a microphone and podcast gear in hand she quickly realizes she wasn’t the only one to have been lured to the island under false pretenses. At first she panics and tries to find any way of getting the outside world to learn about what is really happening on the Caribbean island but then decides to take a step back and work on getting an interview of a lifetime with no one other than famous musician River Stone.

This was a deep dive into the ways social media can influence people and how attached society gets to seeing those “likes” and “follows”. I thought the concept for this YA thriller was relevant and it will definitely make you think. If you’re looking for a unique YA Thriller than I recommend this one!

Amusing. Enjoyable. I liked how the author used a real event as the backdrop to the book. but was still able to create an original story.

Ugh... this was a super sad time for me.

I absolutely LOVED The Mary Shelley Club. This YA thriller was definitely not what I was expecting especially how I was on a high expectation train after The Mary Shelley Club.

Oh my goodness this was a hot mess. It was a bunch of kids fighting over fame.... nothing about a thriller to me? Is that to you?

This book explores how social media and influencers have gone crazy to keep their status. People are really crazy to continue to get what they want and the "Social" status and appearance.

I was so disappointed and sadly I can't rate this higher then a 2.

Thank you to Netgalley and Holt for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

Pub date: 8/30/22
Published to GR: 9/13/22

2/5 stars

I was so disappointed by this book. I absolutely loved her book, The Mary Shelley Club, so I went in to this novel expecting a great thriller. I really had a hard time finishing this one. The shallow characters were so over exaggerated and obnoxious, but the main character was just as annoying. She was obsessed with River, and no one actually seemed to care about survival. In trying to make the book clever or funny, it was just annoying. No one was likable, I didn't really care about the characters being stuck. Unfortunately, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

Anything Goldy Moldavsky writes is gold in my opinion! Plus this cover.... wow!

Thank you Netgalley for my advance copy!

Lord of the Flies meets the disaster of Fyre Fest.

If you wanna dive into this book, keep in mind this is a satire about the life and obsession of social media. This is the funniest mystery thriller I've ever read!

I do like the format of this book, since Rafi our main character owns a podcast talking about true crime in the music industry, we could read the transcripts of her episodes.

This book purposely had a lot of unlikeable characters even Rafi had her flaws. A lot of parts made me roll my eyes because of how ridiculous the situation involved the influencers that were stuck on the island but that's what the book is serving. I can't help noticing that most of the characters resemble real-life content creators, especially Jack, the what so-called beauty guru 😆 but not as obvious as Hella Badid! 🤣

Overall, for me, this is a nice and light YA cozy mystery with tons of humor! One thing that I hope was that we could see Rafi really did the detective work more.

I have enjoyed two other books by this author and I love satire and horror comedy, so I was really excited about this one! Also, the cover is so colorful and fun!
Unfortunately, my enjoyment of this book decreased rapidly as I read through it and it's definitely not as good as the other books I've read by the author. The plot is basically "what if Lord of the Flies happened with the influencers stranded at Fyre Festival?", which is an extremely entertaining concept, but the book itself didn't live up to the potential. I did like all the little nods to Lord of the Flies in names and other things, and I liked the beginning and setup of this book much more than the middle and the end. It was pretty fast paced as well.
There's a murder mystery that doesn't have a satisfying resolution, a lot of annoying characters, a plot that goes nowhere, and just way too many pop culture references. I have a high tolerance for pop culture in my books, and this was too much even for me. (For example, there's a celebrity named Hella Badid...)
I am disappointed to be giving this a low rating but it just didn't work for me in the end.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Rafi Francisco has sacrificed everything — literally all of her savings — to get her ticket and lodging at Fly Fest. The music festival on a small speck of an island was hyped by all the influencers. even Hella Badid is going to be there with her boyfriend River Stone — Rafi’s sole motivation for attending. Rafi is an aspiring true crime podcast with one season under her belt. Her second season will be focused on the rockstar — and how he killed his girlfriend a few years ago. Or, that’s what Rafi believes — and she’s going to get the truth out of River during this music fest.

Ok if you’re not already laughing just reading this description then go ahead and skip this one. IF however this sounds like an absolutely hilarious take on spoofing Fyre Fest and you literally cannot wait to read it, you’re my people.

The premise is hilarious and it’s executed in a way that I found super entertaining — lots of satire on the world of TikTok fame, YouTube makeup tutorials, podcasts — how everyone has one but no one listens to them. This cover is giving horror but really the overall vibe was tongue-in-cheek hilarity.

I read it all in one 5-hour flight from Hawaii to California on the first leg of my trip home from an island trip that was MUCH different from the Mary Shelley Club — which should be on your fall TBR for sure!!

Read if… you watched both Fyre Fest documentaries and love following internet drama.

It’s my opinion that one of the most difficult types of book to write is one of purposeful comedy. Most comic fiction just isn’t actually that funny, for one thing, and a good bit of it is either obnoxious or devoid of meaning or both.

The above makes me especially appreciative of Goldy Moldavsky’s work. We see even less good comedy in YA, and Moldavsky does an excellent job of blending comedy with meaningful plot here, just as she did in the hugely underappreciated Mary Shelley Club.

It’s not that every joke in this book lands (although most of them do, and the book is laugh-out-loud funny pretty frequently), it’s that it never strays into insipidness or gets too try-hard. And underneath the comedy lies a terrific story about loving yourself and, well, not being a myopic jerk.

Protagonist Rafi is…not exactly likable at the outset of the story. She’s got enough righteous indignation to power the sun, but most of it manifests as a serious lack of self awareness and the type and judgmental attitude that won’t make you many friends.

The premise is sort of a fictional comedy about something akin to Fyre Fest and also sort of an updated version of Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens. It doesn’t really feel much like Lord of the Flies, but aside from the well-punned title, I’m not sure it needed to.

Rafi of course comes around in the end, and she finds a way to be better while still being herself. And she encounters a delightful cast of characters along the way, whose desperate actions when stranded on an island with little to offer provide both an opportunity for Rafi to grow as a person and for the reader to engage with some truly hilarious and delightful screwball comedy.

Like Moldavsky’s previous work, this is sharp, funny, and far smarter than your average YA comedy/drama. I hope we see more YA like this in the future, and I can’t wait to see what Moldavsky does next.

I teach Lord of the Flies and I'm always trying to find good YA for my classroom, which is why I requested this book on NetGalley.

This book was so painful to read, I actually got angry. The writing is so bad. I know the writer was going for humor, but it missed on so many marks. Here's a few samples:

---

"Which tents are empty?"
"None," Peggy said.
"Rafi turned to Peggy slowly, bemused, not sure she heard them right. "There's a nun?"

---

His forearm was a swell covered in sparse, golden-haired foliage, coming to a point at his wrist, which was slender but strong. From it branched his hand, wide with long fingers.

---

It was rough. I would say more, but I feel as if the single star indicates enough.

Okay, this was an absolutely wild ride.
Firstly, loved the premise, and now I need to watch that Fire Festival documentary people have told me about.
Secondly, how dare this main character be so relatable to me (but then taken to an extreme that I don't think I would go to at my age)?!

Seriously, this was ridiculous, which is what made it fun, and so much more enjoyable that the book by Golding it was partially inspired by.

Now let me go be in my feels about how much I'm not the target "look" for the platform I have been posting on for years and how much I always wonder if that is holding me back from reaching a larger audience.

Lord of the Flies is a classic piece of literary history documenting the rapid descent of a group of English schoolboys into chaos after being stranded on a tropical island.

Fyre Festival was a disaster of a different sort, with many promises being made to the would-be attendees about an island music festival that would never actually happen.

Goldy Moldavsky's new YA novel, Lord of the Fly Fest is a beautiful and terrible blend of these two, otherwise unrelated things. Our protagonist, Rafi, is a young and (hopefully) upcoming podcast host with a show called "Musical Mysteries." She's staked the success of her show's second season on snagging an interview with River Stone, the hottest musical act to ever come out of Australia, and also a bad murderer, maybe. His former girlfriend, Tracy, disappeared, and he was the last person to have seen her. So Rafi spends every last dollar she has to be at Fly Fest, an upcoming music festival that everybody who's anybody on the internet has been promoting. Arrival on the island quickly proves that everything involved with the preparation for the event has gone wrong. There's no staff to welcome the guests, few tents for shelter, and nothing but an abandoned shipping container full of inedible "cheese" sandwiches for food. Worst of all? None of the musicians who were slated to appear have shown up. None, that is, except for River Stone.

So now, Rafi is faced with a quandary. Does she band resources together to contact the outside world and summon rescue? Or does she let things drag out in the hope of getting that exclusive interview with River, getting the big celebrity shot her podcast needs to get the big endorsement deals (and, y'know, maybe some justice for River's dead [again, maybe] girlfriend, Tracy). She's got to navigate an island full of upset social media influencers and makeup gurus to make her plan work, one way or another. But what if getting River out on an island without contact with the mainland is exactly what he needs to kill again? What really lies beneath the surface of Fly Fest?

Lord of the Fly Fest is brilliant, combining the satirical takes of Libba Bray's Beauty Queens (I'm looking at you, fictional influencer/musician Hella Badid, and bland interchangeable Paul and Ryan) with the atmospheric tension of Agatha Christie. My utmost thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan for an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

This review originally appeared here: https://swordsoftheancients.com/2022/08/30/lord-of-the-fly-fest-a-review/

My feelings towards “Lord of the Fly Fest” are very lukewarm, let’s get that established right off the bat. Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. There were parts that I enjoyed, and parts that just kind of made me shrug my shoulders in indifference. I wasn’t necessarily disappointed in this book, but I’m not really singing its praises.

I already know that something a lot of people will struggle with and point out in their reviews having disliked will be the use of modern slang, language, and pop culture references. This was not at all an issue for me because I knew going into the book that it was a satire. Once I read the synopsis and realized Fly Fest was one big metaphor for Fyre Festival, I expected over the top characters and a commentary about influencer culture and nonstop jokes about this really bizarre moment from history. I thought it was actually pretty funny of Goldy to mix that with the classic “Lord of the Flies.”

I do feel there has to be more than some base familiarity with Fyre Festival in order to pick up all the little jokes and references to it. After I finished the book, I did some Googling about Fyre as a refresher and definitely found some more enjoyment from “Lord of the Fly Fest” in retrospect. For example, I didn’t realize the food given at the real life Fyre Fest was literally cheese sandwiches, just like in our fictional Fly Fest (though in the book they aren’t simply cheese sandwiches).

I’m very familiar with Goldy Moldavsky and the humor that she infuses in her horror/thriller/mystery books (I loved “Kill The Boy Band” and “The Mary Shelley Club”), and I really do enjoy how she does that . I think that was something that worked really well within “Lord of the Fly Fest.”

My biggest gripe with this book was it changed directions a few too many times. Someone was a killer one moment, then the next they weren’t, then they were again, then they weren’t, and so on. While I understand that’s just what Rafi was going through as an investigative podcaster, it got to be a bit much from a reader’s point of view.

The attention to looks and who is and isn’t pretty/attractive was also something that was a bit overkill. Yes, the story is about influencers whose focus is their image from the point of view of someone who has the complete opposite experience, but I feel like every chapter, our narrator Rafi was comparing her attractiveness to everyone else, or going on and on about how pretty the influencers were. There’s a fine line between repetitiveness for the sake of satire and repetitiveness that turns off a reader. It happened enough that I’m here mentioning it in my review as something I wasn’t a fan of. It could have definitely been dialed back.

Overall though, I did like “Lord of the Fly Fest.” The premise is brilliant, a lot of the references are funny, I didn’t get too much of the horror/thriller aspect that I love in Goldy’s books, but I definitely got the shock and humor.

This book reminded me of how much I loved Libby Bray’s Beauty Queens. It is similar in plot and tone with an update to the Gen Z influencer phenom. I enjoyed the insane ride and it’s commentary on voice and participation on life. There are a lot of creepy-fun references to the original Lord of the Flies book, but this YA thriller ends on a more positive note.

Lord of the Fly Fest is a YA thriller novel by Goldy Moldavsky. Rafi Francisco finds herself on a deserted Caribbean island fighting for her life with potential murderers-turned-superstars and manic beauty gurus. How did she get herself into this mess? Fly Fest was marketed as the music event of the season and Rafi knew it was the perfect opportunity to confront international popstar River Stone about the disappearance of his girlfriend for her budding Musical Mysteries podcast. But the festival is a sham and everyone loses their minds, very, very quickly. Rafi just wanted her podcast to take off and now she might not even escape with her life.

Lord of the Flies was one of my favorite required reading books I had to read in high school. I was estatic to read this modern novel of the same concept. This novel was heart-pounding and kept me on the edge of my seat as I read it.

The influencers are objectively annoying and aren't really realistic. But I believe that was the point the author was trying to drive home so I was able to put that aside. I do appreciate the spiraling and manic episodes the characters go through. Very folie à deux (madness of two) or hundreds in this case.

I was able to figure out some of the plot points before they were revealed but not all of them! Those mysteries kept me reading.

I'd recommend Lord of the Fly Fest to anyone who enjoys YA thrillers and wants to read a comical book about influencers losing their absolute minds.

Thank you to TBR and Beyond Tours and the publisher for a copy of this novel. All thoughts and opinions in this review are truthful and my own.

Did not care for this book, read about a quarter of it and could just not finish it the characters were annoying and the story itself was nothing interesting to me. Giving it three stars because I have definitely read worse but this just wasn't my cup of tea, thank you to netgalley and the publishers for this Arc an exchange for an honest review