Let’s Talk: Fluffy Fever

Published on by Jordyn @ Jordz the Bibliophile

You guys know what I’m talking about. The books that you read the blurbs of and say, “AWW this sounds like it’ll be cute.” Because, let’s face it, it probably will be. You’ll finish that contemporary and be like, “I enjoyed that so much!!”

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BUT BE CAREFUL YOUNG SAPLING because our contemporaries have the power to trick us. You may even be suffering from FLUFF FEVER! I have read many a cute, fluffy, fulfilling contemporary and thought “Man, oh man, that was perfection.” BUT IT WASN’T. I gave it five glittering stars on my Goodreads. I was suffering from Fluff Fever.

A couple months later, I’m admiring my bookshelf, as bookworms do, and find myself staring at the book wondering, “What was so great about it?” The answer, my friends, is not really anything.

But the cuteness of contemporary can blind us from the truth. For example, The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West seemed like a pretty good read at the time. But after a couple of months, I found myself remembering that…

  1. Those characters were pretty one dimensional.
  2. The main character made me want to rip my hair out.
  3. The love interest, while cute, didn’t really have many distinctive characteristics, and
  4. I would not recommend this book to a fellow reader or a non-reader.

SO WHY did I like it so much when I read it? This has actually been bothering me a lot lately, so I decided to do some deep-sea thinking and have since come up with a few theories:

  • I was just plain IN THE MOOD for a fluffy, slightly flawed contemporary.
  • I was in a really huge reading slump and just needed something simple and easy.
  • I liked at least one of the side characters enough to see what happened with them.
  • I was entertained by it’s awfulness.
  • And finally, my last, and most promising, theory: THE ENDING WAS ADORABLE.

I’m a sucker for a cute ending. So if an author drops a heartbreakingly sweet epilogue or final chapter, I probably opened the Goodreads app, and gave the book a high rating with stars in my eyes. An adorable ending can make me forget all the boring/flawed/unrealistic/annoying things and/or characters that led up to it.

Of course, some fluffy contemporaries or amazing and will stay amazing long after we’ve turned the last page. But I think we all have at least one book that totally missed the ball, and yet we didn’t notice.

Does anybody else have this problem, or is it just me? Do you have any other theories as to why ‘Fluff Fever’ occurs? What books have sincerely blind-sighted you? Tell me in the comments!

Stay bookish,

Jordyn

6 thoughts on “Let’s Talk: Fluffy Fever”

  1. I love that you put a name to this! I get fluff fever all the time, but not just for contemporaries. Sometimes I’ll read a book rate it on Goodreads then a year or two later change that rating on Goodreads because I realized it wasn’t as good as when I rated it.

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  3. Hmmm yes so I agree that I definitely get ‘fluff fever’ from time to time. Most recently I read P.S. I Like You by Kasie West. I rated it 5 stars and I don’t know if I will think differently a few months from now. I rated it so high because it was a light, funny and adorable read. It was everything I hoped it would be. I didn’t expect to get this deep, gut-wrenching emotional story that left me thinking about it for days, but the amount of enjoyment it provided me was definitely worth 5 stars.

    I think we also have to look at books for what they are. I can’t compare a book like P.S. I Like You to a book like Six of Crows because they are very different and yet I rated them both 5 stars. I expected different things from each of them. BUT I do agree that my mood heavily influences how I rate books which is why I try to wait at least a day before rating them. I don’t know, am I making any sense? Haha. Great post though! Definitely makes me think about how I rate books 🙂

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