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 love 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 heart break 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?
|Review|
It’s so interesting how polarizing Emily Henry books can be. You either love them or write them off completely, never to be spoken of again. I adored Funny Story and while the title is meant to convey “How did you two meet?” “Well it’s a funny story…” I actually did laugh out loud while reading it.
Funny Story hits the ground running from the first page. I actually thought the beginning was a little too fast to rhetorical point where it felt like I was plopped in the middle of the book. I would have liked to have been eased into the scenario of Daphne’s fiancé leaving her for his best girl friend and her now having to live with said best friends’ ex a little more gently. Then again Daphne would have probably liked that too. That being said the pacing wasn’t bad. There wasn’t a dull moment nor were you left trying to figure out just what issues Daphne and Miles each carried from their childhoods for too long. It wasn’t insta-love or lust but a perfectly paced love story.
Daphne is of course a book lover, but this time in the form of a librarian. While some may complain Henry’s characters are different looks but same traits, I think it’s fun to see all the ways one can come by their love of books. She had a good backstory about how she came by her love of the library. While buttoned up and quiet, she was never meek or just someone willing to just lay down and take it. It was a wonderful journey seeing her rediscover herself and who she was outside of being a “we” or relationship girly.
I think most people know what it’s like to be in a relationship where you start to lose yourself a bit. You find yourself eating what your partners likes or doing what they want to do. Your friends become “our” friends and it’s always “we’d” love to do that. It’s something that’s not talked about enough and I enjoyed seeing Daphne and even Miles reclaim the things they lost.
For full transparency I went into this book completely blind so when we were first introduced to Miles I was thinking there was no way he was our love interest. To say our first encounter with him is underwhelming would be an understatement. A scruffy pot head with an odd assortment of jobs, which just turned out to be a man with a breakup beard who worked at a winery that was slow during non-tourist season.
Miles grew on me though with his quirky ways just like he did with Daphne. The two of them were hilarious together. Think Gilmore Girls-esque type of dialogue and conversations, but Daphne was Luke and Miles was totally Lorelei. I laughed an embarrassing number of times. The tension was there between them from the start and I was actually surprised by the number of steamy kisses/scenes we got in this one.
As always I adored the side cast of characters. Ashleigh was refreshing with her straightforwardness and deadpan sense of humor. I also adored Jules and her relationship with her brother Miles. She was so spunky and love how she fit in with Daphne and Ashleigh immediately. Weston also can’t forget the poker gang and immensely long list of vendors Miles knows in town. It was the perfect small tourist town vibes all around and wish we could have kept on exploring it.
While I could wax poetics about Funny Story to you all day, I’ll cut myself off here. Henry has delivered another deep love story filled with witty banter, small town vibes, overcoming childhood traumas and makes you want to believe in love again. I definitely rank it in my top 3 right after People We Meet on Vacation and Book Lovers.
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