My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Received: ARC
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Publisher: Berkley
Point of View: First Person (Daphne)
Genres & Themes: Romance, Contemporary, Contemporary Romance,
BLURB:
A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.
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:
Now what’s a girl to do when you realize that you’ll never be loved as hard and as deeply as those in romance novels?
One of my favorite books is the one where a pair of twins get dumped when their respective partners fall for each other. Once this new pair announces their engagement and invites them to the wedding, they come up with a plan that they’ll find each other’s plus ones for their wedding. The male main character thinks he’s found the perfect guy for his sister and, in the same guy, his new best friend. In the end, he might have actually found the perfect guy for himself. It was the build-up, the chemistry, the fact that the guy was always gay, unbeknownst to the male main character (MMC), and so all along one is thinking one thing while MMC is feeling things but thinks it’s just guys being guy pals. It’s the misunderstanding and understanding of each of the guys, the banter, the chemistry, the coming together, and the dawning of the situations. And like so many of my favorites, I don’t realize it’s a favorite until I’m reading it year after year after just thinking about the premise.
And then you have the other flip side in movies. The My Best Friend’s Wedding, the Made of Honor, the ones where two best friends who are seemingly perfect for each other don’t realize that they’re in love with each other until one is getting married and then it’s a race against the wedding bells to tell them how they feel. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used My Best Friend’s Wedding because they don’t end up together, but in retrospect, I’m a genius (if you get it, you get it). All of this to say that two best friends realize they love each other instead of the person they’ll marry and in rom-coms, we actively root for them to forget their fiancées (in some cases).
In a combination of these two, I found my perfect next read in Funny Story. I find that Emily Henry just gets it. She didn’t give birth to me but she delivered me this great novel.
She delivers each time, even when I don’t believe she will—that this will be the novel where she falls short. So, when she starts by telling Daphne and Peter’s love story, and leads us to their land crashing, to the night that Peter essentially gives her a week to move out of their house on the night of his bachelor’s night for his girl best friend after “realizing” they actually love each other… Only to then have to live with said best friend’s now-ex-boyfriend…
And like I usually do with authors that I’ve previously read and either love or hate their books and read on vibes alone and didn’t know who the love interest was supposed to be in this one only to realize it’s the guy getting high and watching Bridget Jones’s Diary and listening to sad songs, sporting a beard that is compared to those of a lycanthrope, it was giving me not the love interest vibes. But Emily Henry does what she does best…serves it up.
She gives you humanity at its simplest, at its rawest, at its most tender, and its most vulnerable. The ones where we crave. For understanding and love, and for the need to belong, to a place and each other, and oneself.
Henry, I find, is someone who is vastly more interested in people, and their narratives. Not in the explosiveness of a scene or the scheme of a heist, but in the stories of people and their traumas, in the shapes and the molds that make up people. In the whys of us and in the consequences of the little incidents that occur in our lives. And I love that.
I love how you’re lulled into this story that you can’t quite know where it’ll take you, because at first glance—at first thought—it seems mundane, however callous that sounds. The premise is interesting enough: roommates made out of the fallen cards of an engagement and a serious carefree and free-spirited, relationship. The set up of a lie in which she’s fake-dating her ex-fiancée’s new fiancée’s ex-boyfriend, and we know how that goes.
The greatest stories come from the heart and everyday adventures, letting yourself enjoy the little things that paint a bigger picture. Funny Story is full of witty banter, fleshed-out characters, and a slow burn that will take you along for a ride between a summer of discovery and a mending of hearts.
At first, I couldn’t quite find where Miles and Daphne would fit in with each other. It wasn’t merely that they were opposite of each other’s personality and lifestyle traits, but it seemed like forced opposites. A librarian who keeps a calendar fully detailed at the front of their apartment, down to the minute activities, and the guy who, although, is a barista could be the major with how well he knows everyone in town and the next one of over. Like magic, and with skill and care, Henry weaves a world with the characters so real they’ll feel like you’re catching up on your friends’, “Actually it’s a funny story how we got together…you see…”
My favorite stories are where you just get it—you get why two characters like and fall for each other, you get them as characters, and in their decisions, you get why they think and do the things you do, regardless if you agree or not. You get it. Because the novel is so well developed in its characters and stories you just enjoy it for what it is.
In a time, when a lot was happening around me, every time I picked up this book I smiled and laughed, and felt. It also made me feel enough that through its heartbreaking moments, I cried as I read out loud along the characters just to feel that deeply, so much that there were moments when the page doubled and tripled and I couldn’t read the words clearly.
You’re more like Lake Michigan.”
“Cold and bracing,” I say.
His voice drops: “Cool and refreshing.”
“Shocking and painful,” I say.
“Surprising and exciting,”
There is always a moment when I think and fear that an Emily Henry book will let me down and it’ll be the one book that starts the decline. In this one, it was the third-act breakup, and I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily hate the formulaic third-act breakup. If done well, I’ll eat it up every time. Give me the drama. There’s room for the ache, the pining. But, the coming back, the reconciliation has to be just as good. Give me a good grovel scene. I want to see such an ache, you feel it in your bones. Lately, I’ve been finding that romance books are just not committing to it, and like everything I can go into a whole dissertation on it, but I won’t for the sake of keeping this succinct. Though this book doesn’t deliver on my want of a perfect, juicy grovel scene, Emily Henry still convinced me of her ways.
If I can say something about this book that I hope will get you to read it, is that there’s something here for you. It’s a lighter novel than Happy Place, but equally of substance as all that came before. When everything in life feels like too much and too heavy, and like you’re treading through the harshest waters, this is a novel that can balance that out.
“I’d thought we were building something permanent together. Now I realize I’d just been slotting myself into his life, leaving me without my own.”
Daphne’s made her life around Peter, and when she finds herself quite literally thrown out, it’s up to her to find herself. To build a home for herself, to find her community. Sometimes, we find that we can carve space for someone we love, to give them all of us in all the ways we can think of—without reservations. Yet, when you break up, you’re left with shared spaces and friends and families. And sometimes, you feel like others will choose the other person so you set yourself aside to not feel the rejection when they inevitably choose the other person.
“A part of me is just waiting,” I rasp, “for the moment when you see whatever it is that drives people away. And I don’t want that. I don’t want you to stop wanting me around. I think it might break my heart to be someone you don’t like.”
For once, I’m showing restraint in writing this review and when it comes to an Emily Henry novel. There’s just so much that I loved about Funny Story. The way it felt like to grown people who though jaded and hurt, didn’t turn into whiny children for the sake of conflict. The way that Daphne could exist without the men in her life. Womanhood and sisterhood and friends. The passion in doing what you truly love and giving it your all. Painting a wall a bad shade knowing you’ll paint over it, but you do it because you won’t know if it’s a bad shade unless you paint it in the first place. It’s paint after all—you can paint over it.
“I’m exactly the kind of person he can’t handle being with, and he’s exactly the kind who could destroy me,” I explain.
My favorite part? The way it ends, it’s, after all, quite a funny story…
