FRUIT FLY, appropriation is appropriation, and it's always wrong

FRUIT FLY
JOSH SILVER
Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 11, 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mallory appropriates a person's life story because she needs a bestseller. His story is plangently told for sympathy tears because he's been used hard and thrown aside by an uncaring world, left to rot under bridges without housing and unable to access needed treatment for his addictions. Mallory extracts Leo's story by telling lies and faking an identity aimed at piquing Leo's interest in targeting the fake for exploitation, trading sex for cash along the way. Then the really ugly fake begins...her impersonation of a therapist who will help Leo.

Because Mallory needs a bestselling novel idea that she can turn around quickly.

It's hard to overstate the ick that gave me as I read it in the synopsis, except to say it only gets worse as the story itself unfolds. I do mean "unfolds" as the stories of Mallory and Leo are multilayered and coming to light in slow steps, complementing each others' past traumas and shared senses of betrayal.

The language of therapy can hide as easily as it can reveal; the way one uses the techniques involved in therapy do not in and of themselves lead directly to miraculous healing. In these characters' case, neither separately and never the two together are using anything to do more than temporarily and incredibly facilely cope with genuine, terrible traumas. Neither is introspective by nature. You can't fuck for a living and be doing a whole lot of drugs to get it done and still feel on top of your emotional damage; and any writer who can't overcome writers' block by looking inward to see *why* instead of outward to see *what* as a reflex action is deeply, deeply damaged and needs lots of help.

The pair are entangled in a complicated system of interlocking denial told in their own separate voices...always wise to let the perp and the victim have equal access to the reader's attention. It's a loud response to the terrible A Little Life, shifting its ripping and tearing of emotions into bleeding gobbets into clumsy and careless slicing at cancerous infected flesh. It hasn't helped but it is the action that, with guidance, will help as opposed to the lethal wrongness of that other story.

What happens, though, is that the finger-wagging title...y'all know what a fruit fly is in gay circles, right?...and the darkly judgmental tone of her engagement with Leo wears on one's nerves as it drips out in unceasing small, acidic drops. These are not kind people to themselves or others so the novel's length works against it. Yes, I know more details of how terrible each of them is, but really? Do I genuinely need to know this much?

I was also informed the story had thriller elements but I'm not sure what they were. I can get behind a mystery definition of the read because it's a mystery to me why Mallory's husband is still alive and has his balls attached (he's pushing for a kid, so they gotta be there). It's also a mystery why Leo thought he was using Mallory as she strip-mined his life for usable raw materials in several guises; that's a shocking absence of street savvy for someone who makes a living turning tricks.

I found a certain wry amusement in reading the stories because I felt in on the joke, but that was tempered by the very clear and unsparing depictions of abuse and violence and self-harming ideation. It's done plainly, in adequate metaphorical lighting that enables we-the-reader to see the actions and activities without questioning "is that what I think it is?" Yep. It is. The authorial tone is quite unemphatically reporting what is really occurring. That's a virtue, it deprives the pearl-clutchers of their favorite line of criticism: sensationalized overblown etc etc.

It just goes on that little bit too long to be my personal ideal read. Maybe it'll be yours.

FIRE EXIT, Native American author Morgan Talty's debut novel

FIRE EXIT
MORGAN TALTY
Tin House Books/Zando (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Twice in the course of this read I stopped to think carefully about the truth, encapsulated in the truism "every tool is a weapon," that the greatest evils come from the least expected places. Honesty, or simple vanity, or (as reality is next to never binary) somewhere on the spectrum defined by those endpoints, in claiming a daughter Charles has always known he fathered though he was never allowed to parent her thanks to the blood quantum laws (weapons of oppression formed into tools of exclusion by the Penobscots themselves) would ruin her life as it is. Does she still have that life? Why hasn't Charles, her immediate neighbor all her life, seen her at all in weeks? Has she moved away, run away or vanished under more sinister circumstances? He has no standing to ask any of these questions, an off-reservation neighbor in the eyes of the law. "To think that the reservation is what makes an Indian an Indian is to massacre all over again the Natives who do not populate it," thinks Charles.

Elizabeth's mother chose to have his child, who was conceived while Charles was able to live on the reservation thanks to his mother's marriage to a Penobscot man, Charles's alcoholic best reservation-dwelling buddy Bobby, by pretending she was his child...a Penobscot father. Charles's avknowledged paternity would have denied Elizabeth a place on reservation, thus her ancestral identity and such benefits as are available to Native Americans who pass the blood quantum tests. Adding injury to this insult, Charles's dearly loved Penobscot stepfather dies...hunting accident? darker tragedy?...so he must leave the reservation for good. A tool, a gift of identity and grudging economic benefit for Elizabeth, becomes a weapon to deprive Charles of a life he wanted. Charles identifies the weaponization of the tool of identity, of belonging: "It was {dead stepfather} Fredrick’s love that made me feel Native. He loved me so much that I was, and still am, convinced that I was from him, part of him, part of what he was part of. That was how I felt about Elizabeth—in truth, she was a descendant only from her mother’s side, and if that were to come out and she were taken off the census, would she feel any less Native? I didn’t think so."

Charles now wants his daughter found, and to tell her at last who her family truly includes. Armistead Maupin, a true treasure of a writer, activist, and thinker, titled his memoir of coming out after coming of age as a true Southern right-wing boy Logical Family. The journey, the destination, the idea of clipping "bio" from "family," all form part of Charles's heterosexual journey. He is more proof that the reality of love forming family not family necessarily forming love, is more than ever a bulwark against increasingly harsh reality. "I wanted to say it all: wanted to give her all the history that is hers. This past. This family. I wanted her to know, wanted her to understand what it meant that she was being stretched beyond the walls of her parents' house," her family of origin was not all there was to her...or his...world. As the story unfolds Charles grapples with claiming the bio- and logical family as his mother descends into dementia thus dying to him before her body finally dies. All of these are issues I've faced; I was totally engrossed, enmeshed in this multipart logical family struggling to be formed.

Charles spends the entire book obsessing over Elizabeth and his denied paternity, over the ethics of telling her this potentially tribal-membership ending reality...and it suddenly hit me almost three-quarters if the way through: Elizabeth is in her middle twenties! I'd simply never done the math. It changed everything to know this.

Telling an adult who can decide for herself what to do with the life-changing factual information is a duty. It's not optional. Her life is built on a lie, and that is unconscionable to continue to hide from a twentysomething. She's got the life experience to decide for herself if she wants to continue to lie to the authorities. How to handle the fallout, if she tells the truth. She's not a kid...and I also realized that Charles'a obsessive worry about why she's vanished is completely misplaced, even a little creepy.

Charles switched from being "poor old Charles" to being "pick your balls up, put 'em back on, and take action for once" Charles. At almost the same narrative moment, a major plot point resolves. I was left wondering what to think about this altered idea of and opinion about the character I'd invested in so deeply.

That is a very, very good reminder to check the facile, shallow interpretations at Author Talty's doorstep...his short fiction should've taught me that! There is no surface without structure around here. I can't quite finish that fifth star because I found some of Charles's passive acceptance and supine acquiescence unpleasant, if relatable throughout, but the awareness misdirection was truly *chef's kiss*

If you haven't read Night of the Living Rez, his story collection, by all means do. Starting here, or starting as I did with the stories, your decision to make Morgan Talty part of your reading universe is one you aren't likely to regret.

(Where the HELL is my 2022 review of the stories?! Panic stations until I find it!)