Funny Story by Emily Henry

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Funny Story by Emily Henry
Published by Berkley on April 23, 2024
Age Group & Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Representation: Dyslexic love interest
Format: eBook
Source: Library

A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common.

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?

Trigger & Content Warnings: alcohol, anxiety, depression, mental health issues, sexual harassment, substance abuse, toxic relationships, child abandonment, emotional abuse, gaslighting

Funny story, but I didn’t think I’d have a favorite Emily Henry book, at least until Funny Story came around. I mean, I liked most of her other romance books (except for Happy Place — that was awful for me) and thought they were lovely with relatable characters, but they were ultimately… forgettable? You could ask me what Book Lovers was about (and I considered that my favorite before this came along), and I could not tell you.

So what made this Emily Henry book so different from the others? I don’t know, but I can take a guess at it.

For one thing, this sounds chaotic, and I love me a little chaos. I mean, we have Daphne and Peter, but Peter realizes he’s in love with Petra, his childhood bestie, despite him saying, “Oh, we don’t view each other that way.” And then there’s Petra and Miles, which is pretty much how Miles and Daphne find themselves as roommates, because Miles needs a roommate now that Petra is with Peter.

(Or maybe more accurately, “ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex” sounds like a chaotic mouthful.)

Daphne resonated with me beyond the fact she’s a book lover. She’s so nuanced and well-rounded and had a lot of layers — throughout Funny Story, she’s struggling with her own self-worth and feeling like she wasn’t good enough. People (her father, namely) would just leave, or she’d lose connections when she made them over the years. The one steady constant was her mom, and I truly loved seeing their relationship.

Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile.

I also just loved how Daphne grows as a character, too. She feels like that now that she’s no longer with Peter, there’s really nothing left in Waning Bay for her. And so her goal is to search for a new job outside of the town, with plans to leave after the read-a-thon she’s hosting at her work.

Miles also resonated with me a lot as well (and not because he’s such a chaos goblin who went “that’s absolutely amazing” when Daphne told him about her saying they were dating on a whim when talking to Peter) — he’s just as nuanced and well-rounded with a lot of layers.

At first it seems like he’s one-dimensional and someone who just lives life sort of carefree and joyful (I kind of aspire to be him) and he’s just nice to everyone, but we later learn through his backstory about his toxic family that what everyone sees is just a front he puts up. And his niceness? That also came from his childhood, too, and he still feels like he’s letting those around him down.

There’s just so many quotes I can pull from both of them that resonated deeply with me.

As a kid, I just felt so fucking scared and powerless, all the time, and now I just need to be okay.

The romance was cute, and I enjoyed Daphne and Miles’s banter with each other. I also love how adamant Miles is about showing her the joys of Waning Bay and encouraging her to build a life of her own now that’s she’s not with Peter (but he’s also not pushing her, either).

Side note, but I hope Peter chokes on a bucket of sharp pineapples. I’m so glad Daphne is adamant about not getting back with him and standing her ground.

The side characters were also just as well-written and well-rounded; I loved seeing Ashleigh and Daphne’s friendship grow and Julia’s relationship with Miles. They had their own backstories as well, like Ashleigh feeling like she hasn’t made progress in her life because she’s so busy with her kid as a mother and Julia with her own processing of the trauma she and her brother went through with their parents. And we got some closure with Daphne’s father (who also grew in his own way) and a friend from college she grew distant from after her breakup with Peter.

“I’ve always hated my birthday,” Ashleigh explains. “It’s just one more reminder of how little progress I’ve made. I’m in exactly the same spot I was this time last year. Looking at the same four walls in the same house in the same town, only minus a husband.”

I think what Henry did really well was also just exploring the different perspectives of how people view a person, an event, a situation. And maybe this gets explored a lot in her other rom-coms also, but I feel like Funny Story was definitely the first time where I just really noticed it (or everyone just resonated so much with me).

Like with Julia and Miles and their childhood, Miles feels like he ran away and left Julia to fend for herself, but Julia feels like Miles absolutely should have left and yet he came back for her when he can to visit and help her escape, even if it was temporary. And with Daphne and her father’s memories of the library trips when Daphne was a child.

Anyway, Funny Story was a delight to read and left warm, fuzzy feelings in me after I finally finished the book. If there’s one Emily Henry book I’d reread and maybe continue to remember what happened 3 months from now, it’ll likely be this one.