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?
My Thoughts:
I did not like this book at all. I have been wanting to dip my toes into contemporary romance, and this book was chosen for my bookclub so I was excited.
However, it ended up not being for me.
I really struggled with the abandonment issues continually being triggered, and the lack of therapy and general healing?? IDK it made 0 sense to me that she jumped right into a relationship after her biggest trauma being triggered. Where is her healing time, her therapy, etc. I can’t see how they end up HEA when she (and he) didn’t deal with their issues. Sure, they can work on them together but also can they really? When it is relationship trauma, can you really be in a new relationship right away and also be able to heal your issues?
The other thing that fell flat for me was Miles’ admission about Petra. We know based on what he said that he would drop her for Petra, and just the language he used when talking about her screamed “I need more time to get over this before I get in a relationship”.
Maybe this means these types of books aren’t for me, but I didn’t feel like the relationship was healthy or saw a long term HEA coming from this. In the real world, they would have issues down the line and probably would part ways.
Overall, the writing in Funny Story is good, and I can see why people are obsessed with Emily Henry, but I think it’s just not for me.
See what books I think are worthy of a re-read here.
