Author: Jenny Lawson
Why I Read It: #ReadingBingo - Filling in the "Funny" square.
First Line: Call me Ishmael.
First Impression: Witty, biting humor. It can come off as overly snarky if read in a bad mood, however.
Last Impression: Quite the crazy life she's had and the sense of humor to survive/retell it.
Ratings
Overall – 4 Heart Skipped a Beat It was quite funny. Her sense of humor requires a particular mood from the reader and the novelty of her life wears off, but she still is a delightful narrator and you genuinely care about her and her wacky life.
Characters – 4 The people in the book come alive on the page and it is easy to envision her crazy father actually waking them up with a disembodied squirrel puppet.
Story – 5 I wavered here because the book wavered. At times it was a 6, others it was a 3. Overall, her life is too strange to be fiction and fun to journey through.
Narration – 5 Her voice reaches the female audience quite well, but may not translate as well to the male audience. Check out the excerpt, which is taken from the first page of the book, to get a sense of what I mean. The rest of the novel continues in much the same direction. But, being a woman, her narration and style resonated with me. Thus the rating.
Read Again? No. I know the punchline/crazy experience already. But I enjoyed it.
Tell Others to Read? Every woman should read this, and open-minded guys as well. It's exceptionally funny, but some of her best moments are geared toward the females.
Excerpt:...it makes a way more respectable beginning than the sentence I'd originally written, which was about how I'd just run into my gynecologist at Starbucks and she totally looked right past me like she didn't even know me. And so I stood there wondering whether that's something she does on purpose to make her clients feel less uncomfortable, or whether she genuinely didn't recognize me without my vagina. Either way, it's very disconcerting when people who've been inside your vagina don't acknowledge your existence. Also, I just want to clarify that I don't mean "without my vagina" like I didn't have it with me at the time. I just meant that I wasn't, you know...displaying it while I was at Starbucks. That's probably understood, but I thought I should clarify, since it's the first chapter and you don't know that much about me. So just to clarify, I always have my vagina with me. It's like my American Express card. (In that I don't leave home without it. Not that I use it to buy stuff with.)