Imagine having a bad day, opening up your laptop to check your mail and there it sits: a very unexpected email that gives you access to the new book from your favourite author. Because that’s who Emily Henry is for me. Over the years I have loved her books fiercely and Funny Story was my most anticipated book of the year and there it was! I immediately started reading and if you continue reading, you’ll see if I loved it as much as I expected.
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?
Book: Funny Story | Author: Emily Henry | Publisher: Viking | Release Date: 23.04.2024 | Pages: 384 | Genre: contemporary romance
Review:
Thank you to Viking for providing me with an ARC of Funny Story via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!
I went into Funny Story fully expecting to love this. And guess what? I did. I loved this so much. From the first scene of blaring sad songs to the last scene of telling a funny story. I had an absolutely amazing experience reading.
Emily Henry just knows how write characters and stories. She has such a ggood feeling what’s absurd but still realistic, she simply knows where to put a funny sentence, where to make her readers cry.
Funny Story had so much I loved, first of all the characters and their development. I loved how Daphne is quiet and usually invisible but also has a quick wit and good humor as well as her heart at the right place. She’s quick to give people another chance but has enough backbone to say “enough is enough“. Daphne is such a well written character who is shaped by her own decisions as well as her surroundings and who only grows from all of it. She becomes herself even more, standing up for herself and realizes what she wants and who she is. I like that she is her own person but still decides that there are people she definitely wants to have around.
I also really liked Miles. He’s such a *good guy* but in the very best sense of the words. He’s humble, helpful, considerate, yet has flaws. Both Daphne and Miles have them, both of them struggle in their own ways and try to get through it alone. That’s the thing with Emily Henry characters: They aren’t perfect. Never. They have their flaws and quirks, while still being good and interesting and fun to read about. They are incredibly realistic and easy to connect to. It’s not only the protagonists, the side characters all have back stories, feel real (some in weird ways but nevertheless real), and you could just pluck them out of the story and into real life and nothing would feel wrong.
Funny Story‘s romance is also so wonderful! Daphne and Miles have nothing in common except that their ex-partners left them and got together. But they make do with their situation, listening to each other, raging with each other, console each other. They have fun together and heal together which makes them realize a lot about their past relationships as well as what is happening between them and also a lot about their friends and families. They bring out the best in each other while still accepting flaws. There were so many funny moments in their conversations, so many tender ones and so much I could relate to.
I also absolutely adored the side characters and especially Ashleigh and how she welcomes Daphne to her side. Their friendship was such a pleasure to read about!
I feel like I say this everytime I finish an Emily Henry book, but this one might be my favourite. I extremely loved Funny Story and its humor and characters, the way it made me feel a range of emotions I didn’t know I could feel within a single book. I laughed a lot, I cried, I felt for the characters so deeply. One one hand, this was a lighthearted romance, yet it had so much depth in both story and characters. It was a truly funny story with an amazingly written romance, relatable characters, love in every word and sentence and simply said, it was a masterpiece. If I had to read only a single author for the rest of my life, I would probably pick Emily Henry. I can lose myself in her books everytime, again and again, and Funny Story is no exception. It is definitely one of my favourite books of the year, maybe even my favourite already. (Yes I know it’s April.)
Rating:
YOU MIGHT ENJOY FUNNY STORY IF YOU LIKE
roommates | forced proximity | book references | small town romance | librarian MC | good friendships | siblings | loveable characters | fake dating | slow burn | found family | character growth | crying and laughing at the same time
Interested in more by Emily Henry? Check out my review for Happy Place here.
What’s your favourite book by Emily Henry? If you haven’t read one yet, do you plan to? What kind of romance do you enjoy?
Until next time,
