Funny Story by Emily Henry

SYNOPSIS

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it… right up until the moment he realized he was actually in loe with his childhood best friend, Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic - with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heartbreak love ballads - Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her, they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex'-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex… right?

~~~~~

Emily Henry never manages to miss and this book was no exception. She somehow manages to expertly blend the fluff of a romcom with themes of angst including abuse and neglect while topping it off with top tier witty humour. Funny Story manages to wedge itself into your heart and and just…. stay there. It was definitely slower paced than her other books and I did feel it took a while to really hit it’s stride. But once it picked up it really picked up. Daphne and Miles felt very different from Henry’s usual characterizations yet that same heart-rending relatability was almost stronger than ever. This book also felt like more of a love story to books and reading than any of her other books and that’s saying something as it tends to be a common theme. The safety and wonder that libraries can bring to a community was felt through the pages. And, as always, the witty banter and dry humour was top tier. I couldn’t help but love these characters and this story.

We start of with Daphne and the “funny story” of how her and her fiancé met while recounting how she ended up living in a too-small apartment with a man she barely knows. After her fiancé, Peter, and his new fiancé Petra, managed to blow up 4 lives just to be together, those left in the rubble band together to pick up the pieces. This is how Daphne, kicked out of her own house right before her wedding, ends up living with Petra’s ex. Miles seems uninspired and lazy when Daphne first gets to know him but as they slowly build a friendship she realizes that she’s always seen the world in black and white and there are a lot more to people and live than what she’d always known.

I can’t begin to describe how excited I was that we were once again taken back to Lake Michigan in the summer. This book had so many nods to Henry’s Beach Read that it gave me the sense of happy nostalgia. Yet even with such lovely themes of love and happiness, Henry still manages to shed a light on the darker side of humanity and the baggage so many people have. In this book we explore themes of familial abuse and neglect paralleled with the emotional neglect and instability of some romantic relationships. Both of our characters have baggage but they manage to sort through it all together and come out better versions of themselves.

One thing you can always expect from an Emily Henry book is remarkable characters. The themes of growth and self discovery in the characterization of Daphne and Miles impressed me. I’m a sucker for good character development but when that development isn’t just independent work but tied intricately into the plot, the side characters, and the relationship itself, I can’t help but fall in love.

Daphne is perfect. She has the perfect life, the perfect house in a perfect small town with the perfect job and the perfect fiancé. So why does it feel like something is missing long before it all implodes? After her entire life is flipped on it’s axis, she’s forced to confront the way she’s floated through life with her guards up. Daphne’s history of finding solace in the library and fantastic worlds found in books was the most relatable characterization to any book lover and I highly appreciated how deep we got to delve into why outcasts tend to find comfort in books of all things. Daphne’s journey with reading felt personal and I’ve never seen my own love and solace in books expressed so well in a novel. Daphne herself has quite a different upbringing from myself but, despite that, I was still able to relate to her so well with her self-doubt and her inability to make friends easily. Another aspect of Daphne’s character that is so relatable is how much harder it is to make friends as an adult, especially if you were never that good at it to begin with.

Miles surprised me. It took a while for me to start to like him in the way that you’re meant to for a male lead in a romance but he eventually won me over. He felt very surface-level at the start but ended up being such a multi-dimensional character. I found it so impressive that we could get so much depth and understanding of the main male character without even once having a chapter from his point of view. I find that to be extremely skilled writing and, personally, I love when it’s single POV and I can really get into the head of one character while still getting so much insight into the other characters in the book. Miles was definitely a Nick Miller variant but with his own uniqueness and, despite the fashion crime of owning multiple pairs of Crocs unironically, I found him to be extremely cool. There’s nothing more attractive than a supportive, stable man, who knows what he wants. He wasn’t just the main love interest, he was also a great prop for Daphne’s own character development without diminishing his own development in return.

I really loved this book and it lived up to the expectations I’ve grown to have for Emily Henry’s writing. I did give it 4 stars as it wasn’t my favourite of her stories but I still loved it very much. A faster pace and a clearer direction of the nature of the relationship/fake relationship from the start would have knocked this up to a 5 star read. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it beat my heart black and blue, and I loved it. If you love Emily Henry, you won’t be disappointed in this book.