📖 Q: what’s been one of your fave reads of the year so far? This is one of mine! 👆🏻

​I feel like I’m still unpacking some of the things I was explicitly & implicitly taught about how young girls & women should act & books like Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, where the heroine, Nora, is often referred to as a shark, freaking delight me.

She loves high heels, she is a devotee of her phone, contracts, & NYC, she is shamelessly devoted to pros & cons lists, & the hero, Charlie Lastra (*swoon*) tells her YOU DON’T NEED TO CHANGE (that might be an exact quote from the book FYI), you are a terrifying force of nature & I worship the ground you conquer.

Book Lovers is a dream book to me, one that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. It’s dislike to love and fish out of water with two uptight, big city leads who move temporarily to a small town, & it’s peppered with references to Jane Austen, the Dewey Decimal system, & Rebekah Weatherspoon. I wanted two Epilogues.

It’s also about the relationship between sisters & how that can be affected by feelings of responsibility & protectiveness—how hard it can be to throw those things off & chase something for yourself.

This book had me smiling & thinking how funny it was, it had me swooning for both leads, it had my heart twisting…it’s sooo good!!

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a really good rom com. But parts of Kate Spencer’s In a New York Minute give me those vibes.

Take Meg Ryan walking the streets of NY knowing she has mail…from you; add some BFF moments like in 27 Dresses; add in an uptight lead who’s often misunderstood like Sandra Bullock in The Proposal; & a beautiful, alive city, NYC, that shines & welcomes & helps make magic happen.

But there are other parts of this book, mainly a lot of what happens after 65%+, that frustrate me. Honestly, there was one moment where I deliberated not finishing bc the characters made me that annoyed.

Hayes, the hero, is uncertain & by God ruminates over his mistakes & that feels so RELATABLE & often refreshing. But he also keeps dilly dallying about a relationship with Franny.

Franny, the heroine, is going through a lot professionally & personally. Also relatable. But the conflict—which she urges forward like she’s emptying a bottle of lighter fluid on a campfire where delicate little s’mores are cooking (does this analogy work or not?) 😆—had my eyes & heart feeling like 🙄.

Basically there is so much passivity in their relationship from the beginning to the ending pages. Maybe that is relatable too. But it was not a reading experience I loved all the way through.

There’s a lot to commend itself about this read. It is often adorable. It is often funny. The best friends are amazing. I love how refreshingly insecure the hero can be. But most of the moments shine for me toward the beginning & not so much at the end.

​A series of essays written about her life and observations, Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody is hilarious, smart, and hilarious. (I have to mention that twice because it’s so funny). Kendrick discusses her dedication as a child actor (she travelled from Maine to NYC by bus with her teenage brother so that she could audition); her experiences on Twilight and Up in the Air; what it’s like being broke and what it’s like being not-broke; and above all, what it’s like to be a short woman who appears younger than she is and who does not quite fit in.
 
This book is really, really great. Like I noted in my blog post about Amy Schumer’s The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, I appreciate it so much when female writers return to the embarrassing/funny/sad/exciting moments of their lives and mine them for humor.
 
Which woman (and man?) among us doesn’t remember what a minefield our teen years and early twenties were? (Or was this just me?) But I love that Kendrick finds the humor in those moments and that she’s gentle with that past version of herself without excusing any behavior that she sees as less desirable. The fact is: there is so much humor to be found in what we do, and even in how seriously we take some of it, sometimes.
 
Despite how funny the book is, the title seems to come from a more serious place: a text to her brother in which she says “I miss being a scrappy little nobody. I was much more capable.” This book is her present-day challenge; a way to “test to see if I still had some nerve.”
 
I loved Kendrick’s quips, her trenchant observations, and the theme of unconventionality running throughout. Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody is a recommended read for January (or any other time of year), for the “scrappy little nobody” in all of us.