REVIEW: Funny Story

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on May 22, 2025 • ( 0 )

About the Book

Title: Funny Story

Author: Emily Henry

Genre: Romance

Pages: 400

Edition Read: Hardcover

Dates Read: May 4 – 6, 2025

Blurb: 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

I will be 100% honest and say that I would never have read this if it wasn’t for my GoodReads Awards reading challenge. This book won the award for Best Romance and, while I have nothing against the Romance section of the book store, it’s not one that I typically gravitate towards either. This is why I am excited to be doing this challenge though – it’s pushing me out of my reading ruts and making me read things I wouldn’t usually pick up. And in this case, I’m very glad that it did.

This book was really cute and delightfully charming. One of my complaints with Romance is often that it’s too predictable and relies heavily on tropes – will Daphne and Miles end up together? Duh! Of course they will! This can’t be considered a spoiler, despite being the end of the story, because there’s no mystery to it. That’s what this genre is for (there are exceptions, I’m sure, but I’ve not come across them in my limited scope). For me to enjoy a Romance novel, there has to be something really compelling that keeps me invested, which is usually the characters.

I loved Daphne. She is dealt a really terrible hand in all of this and yet she doesn’t give up. She figures out her next moves and works on improving her situation, finding friends in the most unlikely places and making a home out of the town she had just moved to in order to marry her ex-fiance (Peter is awful and I wish bad things on him). Plus, she’s a librarian, so of course I like her. The real star of this book, however, is Miles. Miles is the most wonderful person. He is kind, thoughtful, supportive, and has connections to every farmer’s market in the area. He and Daphne have very little in common (opposites attract, another trope!) but end up relying on each other to get through their mutual break ups and (of course) end up falling in love.

The story was cute without being too cutesy, which irritates me sometimes. And while half the time I felt like yelling at both of these two (good god, just sleep together already!), the push and pull between them had a plausible reason for them to be cautious (they are both still heartbroken and very much on the rebound). These characters are so likeable that you want them to end up happy and, of course, end up together. Which they do! Yay!

This book was definitely not something that I would pick up, but was definitely something that I very much enjoyed.

GoodReads rating: 5 stars