This is a quick read with an extra likeable cast of characters. I loved Heidi's friends and her excellent fannish obsessions. And a happy ending that's a tiny bit too pat and sweet only added to the book's charm for me. Fun fun fun! ( )

I wouldn't recommend this book to any of my friends. I was disappointed because it was dragged out way longer than what it needed to be, especially for the way it ends. 2Q2P The cover art is okay and I'd recommend this book to middle and high school students. I chose to read this book because I liked the cover and one of my friends said it was funny. Other readers should know that the chapters are long and you can lose interest by the time they're over. AriannaD

I knew I was going to be entertained by this book, just from the name and the summary I read on the inside cover. But what I didn't expect was how much I ended up enjoying this book! Mind you, it has all the stereotypical settings: high school, everyone getting hooked up and ruining the "best friend gang~!" feeling of the years before, and then our main female lead trying to fit in as best she can to try to save that group of friendship she had with her buddies. Then again, I guess that's exactly why this book ended up being so atypical compared to today's standard for books! Our main girl isn't fawning for five BILLION pages over some random ass that likes her because. Just because. Because that's how books do it now! Reason? Logic? What anal foreign concepts are those in these hip new times where brains are removed to aid children through their pathetic attempts at LIFE? *Ahem* Pardon me, I forget. Most of the crowd IS brainless to the point of lacking the ability to even comprehend a sentence's complexity beyond, "I LOVE YOU." "OMG ME TOO! YAY! LET ME STALK YOU AND WHINE AND BITCH IF I DON'T GET ANYTHING I WANT EVEN THOUGH I DO NOTHING WORTHWHILE TO EVEN VALIDATE MY USE OF OXYGEN!"

Yeah. Books like that: Not. This. Book.

And THANK the LORD it isn't! No my dears, this book is high school and drama like it SHOULD be! With actual ISSUES and anxieties that any normal human being would feel! God, it's a relief to read something that can classify as a teen-drama without it being about sluts, skanks, wusses and whores, whiny useless twits and their flippin' lack-of-a-frontal-lobe cancer. Stupidity, you have officially qualified in the Disease category.

My Invisible Boyfriend is unusual in some manners. Some might peg it as pathetic that a girl would imagine up her own boyfriend like our main character Heidi did, but is that so far from any girl's fancies? Excuse me: ANYONE'S fancies?! Come on! How many of us HAVEN'T had a dream/ideal of what our significant other was supposed to be like? And who's to say in this technological age that many don't still pull what she did? Get online, create a profile, and pretend to be your own boyfriend so your friends and the entire school doesn't think you're the only one without a boyfriend when everyone else has hooked up. Makes perfect sense. And the humor and playful imaginative cut-scenes between the actual daily life (thanks to our creative Heidi) make things nutty without coming off as over-the-top or too stupid to entertain.

In fact, the entire book has a great sense of humor! You'll get used to it fairly quickly after a couple of chapters. It's a read truly written for the teenage years, using the lingo, the references (Ahem: Portal, Project Runway, and so many more~), and all the issues that anyone would go through. Nicknames, fanciful fantasizing, crushes on people that don't exist, a part-time job, parents being weird--this book has all the essential elements. And! It's at a boarding school!! How cool is that?!
But now let's talk a bit about the characters! First awesome part: None of them are annoying dumbasses! 8D HOORAY!!! A TEEN DRAMA IN HIGH SCHOOL WITHOUT THE DUMB! Thank the Blessed Lord!!!!
Plus. The friends are varied, of every different clique and personality, and it makes for a chaotically pleasant mish-mosh of people that we get to see helping our main girl detective around. Not to mention, for my anime fangirls: Yaoi~!
Readers, it's definitely an entertaining and fun read: light without being pointless! It's an enjoyable book that appeals to people who like the high school drama and romance scene (with a bit of a dorky detective aspect adding some mystery~), but that's definitely not too much of one or the other to be restricted to people who like only that. You can definitely still find amusement value in this book without needing to be a fan of the high school, the drama, the mystery, the dorky, etc parts. So give it a shot! If it doesn't feel like your cup of tea after a few chapters in, then that's all good. It may not appeal to all audiences, especially if you like genres that are typically not this one. But it still remains a really good book to read for fun and for pleasure: and isn't that what half of reading is all about?
I do feel I need to say one more thing however, and it involves explaining my rating a bit. This book deserves the five stars I gave it. That's why I gave them after all. However, would I say I loved and adored and freaked out about the book as much as I did about say, Lord of the Rings? No. My personal taste does not classify this book as "Amazing." However! What qualifies this book for the five stars is that it was written flawlessly, flows well, has great plot and unfolds seamlessly, and the characters hold their own. No one part of the book drops below a certain standard, which makes the book, for its genre and as a piece of literary work itself, worthy of the five stars I gave it. That above all is the reason I gave it what I felt it deserved, even if my own personal tastes are not called to a book like this above others.

So, yet again, go try it out! After all, some of the "best" authors of today don't even get right what this book can accomplish. ;3 ( )

My Invisible Boyfriend by Susie Day is about the difficulties of being the last one in a group of friends to find a date. Heidi, who goes to a boarding school — only because her father works there — is such a person. All her close circle of friends are dating and she's the last singleton.

While she's not all that interested in dating, she's not immune to the pressure. She decides to relieve some of that pressure by inventing a boyfriend based on her favorite TV character — Mycroft Christie.

To make her boyfriend seem more real, she creates an online identity, including giving an email address and chat ID. She then emails back and forth to create the appearance of a long distance relationship. A goof up, though, gives her friends access to "his" account and soon she is chatting and emailing with her friends in her boyfriend's voice.

As you can imagine, there's only so far this sort of deception can go. I enjoyed both parts of the book — the set up and the aftermath when her deception falls apart. Yes — Heidi and company are shallow. They're young and at that age when bad ideas seem like good ideas. If the internet had been around when I was a teen, I probably would have invented a whole cast of fictional characters.

Stylistically — especially with Heidi's odd ball grammar, unbridled enthusiasm and sometimes weird word choice — reminds me of the Confessions of Georgia Nicholson series by Louise Rennison. OK, I say that a lot — but I love the series and it's the bar I hold similar series to. This book comes close. ( )

Day, S. (2009). My Invisible Boyfriend. New York: Scholastic Press.

275 pages.

Okay, so this is another book that got my attention before it was even published and then post-publishing it kept slipping to the far side of the mountain of books in my To Read As Soon As Possible Pile.

But look, here I am, getting to it!

Appetizer: Fifteen-year-old Heidi is in love with Mycroft Christie, the protagonist of her favorite cancelled TV series. So with the start of a the new school year, she's excited for another year of watching her favorite show and hanging out with her four best friends. However, when the new year begins, Heidi is in for a shock when all of her friends seem a little more...boy fixated than they were last year.

A small misunderstanding leads to her friends thinking Heidi has a boyfriend too. A deception she goes with that only leads to more and more misunderstandings and problems comparable to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (which by the way, also happens to be the play Heidi and her friends are working on for the end of the term).

I initially had a little trouble getting into My Invisible Boyfriend. I found Heidi's voice a little off-putting. I had to reread a sentence or phrase here and there to make sense of them. But as the plot started to pick up and Heidi was developing the story behind her imaginary boyfriend, I started to get used to the voice and eased into it.

I did really like a lot of the tensions of the books. What was Heidi to do? All of her friends suddenly had boyfriends. Heidi wasn't ready to be kissed by any random guy. So, why not re-imagine her favorite TV character has her boyfriend? She just wanted to belong.

I hadn't anticipated that Day would be using the fan-girl angle to inspire Heidi's characterization for her imaginary boyfriend. I thought that was a nice touch, especially as a person who is prone to having literary crushes of my own. (My imaginary boyfriend would also be British...and we'd meet by him apperating right beside me. Sure it'd be awkward at first, what with him having to explain to me that magic existed, but then we'd have an awesome snarky conversation over a latte (me) and tea (him). (Sigh.*)

Ahem, Refocusing...Plus, since Heidi contemplates aspects of her favorite show and has imaginary conversations with one of the characters, the story forms a meta-narrative, encouraging the reader to think about the qualities of a book or show in the same way.

It's also worth noting, that despite Heidi's imagined conversations with Mycroft. She never feels like a character who has lost touch with reality. She's just adapting to the situations at school using what she knows best.

Also, the way she creates her boyfriend's personality online is very interesting. It reinforces the small ways that personality is shared and includes the subtle message about online stranger danger.

One of the minor characters was nicknamed "Peroxide Eric" for his dyed hair. I couldn't help but think of the name Eric and how it seems to attract some type of adjective, description, marker-thing. For example, I have a friend who has a boyfriend named Eric. He is regularly called "Eric the Swede" by everyone. In my head, this guy's name is Eric the Swede. Although I think I have yet to say that to his face. Mainly because I don't get to see him that often. Then there's Eric in the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. Viking Eric. Eric the Vampire.

I'm just wondering. Is it because the name is so short?

Dinner Conversation:

"You know your life is not exactly normal when you're sitting on the steps on the first day of school, sugar-high giddy from knowing they're about to unlock the doors.
But then no one at Finch is normal. They only send you here when you've been kicked out of every other boarding school on the planet--if your parents can afford it" (p. 2).

"Mycroft Christie, in case you live under some kind of rock, is the most brilliant person in the universe, and totally my boyfriend. Sort of. Technically, he's not real. Technically, he's the debonair twenty-third-century time-traveling hero of the best! TV show! ever! Mycroft Christie Investigates is not actually going to turn up on my doorstep anytime soon to whisk me away to fangirl heaven" (p. 3).

"I realize I'm not dealing with zombie robot doppelgangers. It's the love potion episode. Every TV show has it sooner or later. Magic spell, monster bite, something in the water: romantic Kryptonite that makes people lick faces with people they shouldn't. Mycroft Christie ended up snogging a vampire, an evil old lady who trained exploding hamsters to break into banks, and Jori Song (twice) while under the influence of bad mojo. Hilarious consequences generally ensue.
It's not so entertaining when you're in the middle of it" (p. 15).

"It's like being undercover. I could be exposed at any moment but only if I miss up and say too much. It's a total thrill" (p. 46).

Tasty Rating: !!!! ( )