Funny girl

Never before has the time-worn critic's trope "Show, don't tell" been more utterly ignored than by Nick Hornby and his ambitious, yet thoroughly lackluster (and curiously unfunny) novel about British televised comedy in the 1960's-'70s, Funny Girl . I admire Hornby's vision here; his drive to present Leggi tutto

Speaking at a college campus a few years ago, I joked about feeling like Lucy in the chocolate factory, and an undergraduate asked me when Lucy Hale worked in a chocolate factory. It was one of those moments when you suddenly picture yourself stooped and holding an ear trumpet. As a child, I watched Leggi tutto

Being funny is a serious business, and in his latest novel Nick Hornby gets to demonstrate that making people laugh is just as valid and fulfilling a life choice as curing diseases or educating the masses or studying history, philosophy, economics. I’m mentioning these fields because the novel is ab Leggi tutto

I'm such a big fan of Nick Hornby and this book is such a disappointment. I'd almost prefer not to provide a review. I have looked forward to this book for months now and received it from Penguin's First to Read. Perhaps the problem is with the narrator providing such distance from the characters th Leggi tutto

How he does it, I don’t know, but Nick Hornby creates interesting characters and turns them into human beings we actually care about. In Funny Girl, he does it while successfully evoking a whole era – early sixties London on the cusp of change, from a dour post-war Britain to a world where anything Leggi tutto

Meant to be an easy, breezy, affectionate nod to the 60's - but I found it bland. Like creme brulee without the sugar topping - just no snap to it. I couldn't wait to be finished. Sorry, Nick Hornby fans - think this one is a bit of a miss.

You know how there's that cliche question of "If you could have dinner with anyone at all, dead or alive, who would you choose?" and then your answer is supposed to establish a whole bunch of things about who you are or your compatibility with someone or something? Well, my fantasy dinner guest has

2015 F.A.B. Bookclub pick # I.❤️. F.A.B.

“What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but ‘love’ would have to do for now” Funny Girl is the sixth full-length nove Leggi tutto

This book was one that I wished I had stopped reading a quarter of the way through but I kept hoping it would get better. It didn't. The author's characters were so underdeveloped that I truly didn't care what happened to them. This was basically a story about...nothing. I found it very boring.