Lord of the Fly Fest (Goldy Moldavsky)

Lord of the Fly Fest
Goldy Moldavsky
Henry Holt and Co.
Fiction, YA Humor/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The hottest ticket of the millennium is Fly Fest, a star-studded week of models and music and nonstop parties on a private tropical island, where even the cheapest accommodations cost two thousand dollars - almost every penny Rafi Francisco has in savings. Unlike the vast majority of attendees, the hardcore fans and influencers and other internet-famous phonies, Rafi is a serious (if small-time) podcaster, and Fly Fest will be her best (and likely only) chance to corner Aussie pop sensation River Stone and ask him the question no interviewer or police detective has ever apparently dared to ask: did he kill his first girlfriend in the outback? Oh, everyone knows the sob story he tells, how she abandoned him on a camping trip and broke his heart (and inspired the songs on his chart-topping debut album), but Rafi's own investigations are enough to tell her that River's story holds less water than a thimble. If she can get him to confess, she can not only bring a killer to justice, but maybe her podcast will finally break into the big time.
She should've known it would all go wrong.
When the boat arrives at the private island, they're greeted by nothing but a half-built dock. There is no stage. The closest thing to the promised villas is a collection of cheap survival tents. The only food is a crate full of cheese sandwich-shaped items that may or may not actually be edible. There isn't even a single Fly Fest staffer on hand to explain what's going on. The only celebrity who showed up is River Stone himself. And, worse, there's no wifi. Rafi is still determined to get her interview and her confession, but the longer everyone is stranded, the worse the situation becomes... especially when she can't be sure whether or not they're stuck on an island with a serial killer.

REVIEW: As the title implies, this is a satiric homage to William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies, only instead of marooned English schoolboys degenerating into violent anarchy in isolation, it's a group even less prepared to confront a survival situation: a gaggle of internet-addicted wealthy elites who wouldn't know how to recognize unfiltered, hashtag-free reality if it cracked them on the skull like a coconut.
Rafi starts out convinced of her own moral superiority even as she can't help but feel inferior; she sees herself as a serious investigator, not a vapid spewer of meaningless fluff and unattainable beauty standards like most everyone else stranded on the island, and her lack of a six-figure bank account makes her more grounded, yet being surrounded by such impossibly perfect and inexplicably popular people - people who almost seem to be another species altogether, inhabiting a world that only tangentially connects to the planet Earth - can't help but remind her, second by second, how small her voice truly is, how little she even belongs at Fly Fest (the planned mega-festival or the actual fiasco both). The only reason she's initially noticed at all is that she's mistaken for a staffer due to an ill-advised decision to wear festival merchandise to the festival itself; that, and she's so nondescript that nobody else can conceive of any other reason such a drab, ordinary person could possibly be in their presence. Various characters offer fun-house-mirror versions of characters from the Golding classic (I'm sure I would've caught more parallels had I read the book more recently than high school), as most of them stubbornly refuse to believe the reality of the situation (and the fact that they've all been duped and abandoned) and instead - as they do in their normal lives - create an entirely fictitious idea of Fly Fest, trying to replicate their Instagram-worthy personas on a deserted island via increasingly hilarious stunts and extremes. Despite her determination to remain aloof from the madness and pursue her own agenda, Rafi finds herself drug deeper and deeper into the delusions, even as she discovers an unexpected connection with the object of her obsession, the maybe-killer pop star River Stone. When an influencer disappears, River is her immediate prime suspect, but her tendency to latch onto conspiracy theory thinking becomes her own form of the insanity that sweeps the rest of the crowd, for all that she's among the few who fights to remain aware of what's really going on and the trouble they're all in. Along the way, she learns just how much she has in common with the people she swore she'd never have anything in common with... and how dangerous a person can become when their worldview come under threat.
With many snicker-out-loud moments, the story presents some clever commentary on our social media obsessions and cultural tendency to elevate ideas of reality over the actual experience of reality itself, and how none of us are as immune as we like to think we are to the trends and mindsets surrounding us. The ending feels like it loses its chain of thought, though it's not quite the disappointingly (and pointlessly) abrupt ending of the original Lord of the Flies, almost costing it its full fourth star. Lord of the Fly Fest might've done better to break more fully from the source material (and indulge in the darker side it teased but never quite committed to). In the end, I found the story fun enough overall to keep the Good rating intact.

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