So my relationship with Emily Henry books has been a bit of a roller coaster. But we’re back baby! Funny Story cinches it for my second favorite of all time! We love a good BAD ex! Keep reading this book review of Funny Story for my full thoughts.
Summary
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
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the Libro.fm. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Okay so my first thoughts on Funny Story was that we love to be united in our hatred of an ex. There’s nothing better than gossiping with your friend who had an ex you always hated and being united now in your new found spite. And Funny Story delivers two for the price of one. So many of my notes from the beginning were, “we hate her ex be so for real”. We also love a good “let me post really hot pictures after my breakup”. Naturally Funny Story started off fulfilling both of these.
But what I really loved was Daphne’s journey. Her past relationship turned her into a “we” person. The type of erosion of ourselves, our hobbies, our interests, our friends. Until all we have left are the things we share. It’s a process that goes so slowly, you wake up years later and realize you’re still stuck here. Funny Story is Daphne’s story remembering who she is. Who we are when we aren’t the ‘we’ and to know that we won’t be a good ‘we’ if we aren’t a ‘me’. And for me, this just hit a bit too close to home. While the personality from Book Lovers might be me, this past, this trauma? Totally me.
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In Funny Story I also loved the side characters. It wouldn’t be an Emily Henry book without me loving the side characters. Certainly sometimes they’ve stolen the show…cough Happy Place cough… but here I obviously loved these ones too. We love a good best friend who knows when not to push and that we’re the real deal. Funny Story is a damn close second favorite Emily Henry book. We also love a good dissolving of the line between fake and real. That always gets me in these fake dating books!
Find Funny Story on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.