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3.5 

Number One Fan

By Meg Elison
Number One Fan by Meg Elison digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

"Elison’s brutal, incisive novel cuts to the heart of what makes public figures vulnerable and asks us to question our voyeurism." New York Times Book Review

She created a beautiful world. Now he wants it all.

On her way to a speaking engagement, bestselling novelist Eli Grey gets into a cab and accepts a drink from the driver, trusting that everything is fine. She wakes up chained in the stranger’s basement. With no close family or friends expecting her to check in, Eli knows she needs to save herself. She soon realizes that her abduction wasn’t random, and though she thinks she might recognize her captor, she can’t figure out what he wants. Her only clues are that he’s very familiar with her books and deeply invested in the fantastical world she creates. What follows is a test of wills as Eli pits herself against a man who believes she owes him everything—and is determined to take it from her.

Terrifying and timely, set against the backdrop of convention culture and the MeToo reckoning, Number One Fan unflinchingly examines the tension between creator and work, fandom and source material, and the rage of fans who feel they own fiction.

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50 Reviews

3.5
“I was not this book’s number-one fan. It was a book. It was just kind of… ridiculous. Not only that but I couldn’t help but find several callbacks to Misery by Stephen King. It just felt like a rehash of a story that I didn’t think needed to be rehashed. I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mindset for this one at the time but… I just didn’t like Eli, the FMC. And maybe that was the point. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to connect with either of the characters. The author certainly didn’t make her likable and there was a bit of a takeaway from both of them being completely unlikeable characters. I just didn’t even feel sorry for her even towards the end. Not even at all. And she underwent some pretty gruesome punishments. So, Leonard poses as Eli’s Uber driver. He drugs her and takes her back to his home where he ties her up in a bedroom and holds her hostage. She is to follow his rules or she is to be punished. Homegirl is NOT a rule follower we come to find out. Leonard is obsessed with Eli’s books and wants her to play the part of the main character. How far will she go to stay alive and how sloppy will he get leaving room for her to mount an escape? This book was just creepy and brutal and annoying. The FMC did things that I was sitting there thinking, “OK, seriously?” Some of the things she said… she just… I don’t know. She irked me. Maybe that’s why it was so hard for me to get into it. If you’re looking for a book where you don’t connect with any characters and there’s no one to root for and you enjoy watching someone pee all over herself just to be a pain in the ass and make other extremely questionable choices while being punished rather brutally by a captor, this might very well be the book for you. It just wasn’t for me. TW: there are some quite graphic and gruesome scenes in this book. If you're squeamish, it might be best to stay away from this one.”
“This is a pretty good book, not great. And I can’t figure out why. It has good intensity and pacing. I really just didn’t care much about the characters. So maybe the character development was not there. I did get it on audio from my library. It might have been better if I had physically read it! https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8teMU8R/”

About Meg Elison

Meg Elison is an author and feminist essayist. Her debut, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Otherwise awards finalist. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. She lives in a queer poly commune on the East Coast. megelison.com@megelison

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