Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/05/23

The Treatment, Wake Up The Neighbourhood (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Yep, it’s been a little while since we checked in at Frontiers Music Mercy Hospital, where throwback-arena-rock bands and power-metal dudes get record contracts that most of them don’t deserve. No, I kid Frontiers Music, there’s hope, rockers, and isn’t it past time for a rawk resurgence? I think so, so let’s put this one under the snark-o-scope, the latest from this Cambridge, U.K. hard rock band, which has opened for Kiss and Alice Cooper and is professed to be influenced by Def Leppard, AC/DC and Thin Lizzy. Usually these bands don’t sound like their RIYL suggestions, but this one’s in the right pew, I’ll admit. The dumbly named “Let’s Wake Up This Town” is like a lost AC/DC demo from the ’90s, you know the period; “Back To The 1970s” is more along the hair-metal lines of Poison; “This Fire Still Burns” is Skid Row prostration, and bonk bonk bonk, yadda yadda, the overall effect is Buckcherry (if you’ve never heard that band, I beg of you, don’t bother, but in the meantime this band is a hundred times better than them). B-

John Escreet, The Epicenter Of Your Dreams (Blue Room Music)

Touted as a best-in-class practitioner of Myra Melford et al.’s “free-bop post-Cecil Taylor aesthetic,” this modern jazz pianist herewith tables his second album for Blue Room, a small Korea-based label. It’s not often I’m compelled to use an adjective like “relentless” when covering jazz, but there’s no better one to describe opening track “Call It What It Is,” in which Escreet’s keys alternately explore mechanically precise syncopation and busy waterfalls of 64th notes. Returning to this quartet from Escreet’s 2018 Seismic Shift album are bassist Eric Revis and drummer Damion Reid, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner adding the final piece to a world-class group. The arrangements are bold and dominating except when they’re not, in gentle but resolute chillouts like the title track. Don’t miss this one. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here we go, kids, summer’s a-comin’, we’re staring down the barrel of the May 24 music-CD release date, doesn’t it seem like it was 10 degrees out like a couple of days ago? Boy, this climate apocalypse really is the dickens, am I right, fam, but let’s see what craziness is in the list for today, my super-secret list of new album releases that cements my status as the greatest CD reviewer in the history of this Granite State, unless Dr. David Thorp moved here because he couldn’t afford the rent in Boston anymore, which has to be, what, $8,000 a month these days for a tool shed in Dorchester? Tell me when everyone’s gotten a grip on reality, but meanwhile let’s talk about music albums, like this new one, Frog In Boiling Water, from Brooklyn slacker-indie quartet DIIV! These guys look like Kiss, if Kiss were 98-pound weaklings and all of them except for the Peter Criss wore $5 mail-order eyeglasses from EyeBuyDirect.com. But eyewear fashion aside, what say we go investigate this nonsense and plumb its depths for aesthetic verisimilitude, in other words let’s see what bands they rip off, I’m as excited as you are, trust me. I’ve got a simply capital idea, folks, let’s listen to the title track to get a general gist of what the dilly is, by all means let’s. Wait a second, actually, this is cool, really grungy, like Nirvana, which makes me want to go on a rant about how ’90s music is going to be everywhere before you know it, but you must have figured that out by now. It’s low-slung, muddy and metallic, with an extreme emo-metal tinge to the guitar sound. You’ll probably love it, I’d hope.

• Ha ha, oh no, it’s Old Man Luedecke, with a new album called She Told Me Where To Go! There is no person named Luedecke, by the way; that’s the stage name of alt-country banjo-picker/singer Christopher Rudolf Luedecke, who has won multiple Juno awards, the Canadian version of the Grammys, and shouldn’t they be spelled Grammies, what the devil is going on here. Anyway, the single from this album, “She Told Me Where To Go,” is a jolly good one from this Canadian soy-boy. It definitely borders on Muddy Waters territory, except with, you know, kind of wimpy singing. He’ll probably win another Juno for this, and I wouldn’t begrudge him for it.

• You may recall that America started swirling down the cosmic drain when reality TV shows started getting 100 times worse than they’d ever been, and House of Carters led all those shows straight to the vortex, like some sort of demented pied piper. It only lasted eight episodes but hoo-wee was it awful, lol. Along with former Backstreet Boy Nick, all the other Carter siblings were there, being cringe, including Aaron Carter, whose new album, The Recovery Album, is a posthumous affair, because he died in 2022. “Blame It On Me” is a heart-tugging boyband ballad that isn’t completely awful, may I go now?

• We’ll bag it this week with Columbus, Ohio-based alt-hiphop/indie/electronica/whatever duo Twenty One Pilots, whose new LP, Clancy, continues the dystopian-fantasy conceptual trip they’ve dabbled in for years now (they promised to stop after this one, but I don’t believe them). Once again the lyrics are set in the metaphorical world of Trench and the horrible city of Dema; the single, “Backslide,” evokes a futuristic Eminem with enough underground hip-hop vibe to make it non-barf-inducing.

Worry, by Alexandra Tanner

Worry, by Alexandra Tanner (Scribner, 290 pages)

If there’s a twentysomething in your life, or if you are one, you will love Jules and Poppy, the anxious and squabbly sisters in Alexandra’s Tanner’s debut novel, Worry.

And also, at some point, you’ll just want to throttle them.

Tanner has bottled the nervous essence of youthful TikTok and spilled it out on the page in a quirky, pre-Covid novel that is dialogue-driven and plot-deprived but somehow manages to be fun to read.

It begins — and ends — in 2019. Poppy Gold, the younger of the two sisters and ostensibly the least emotionally stable, arrives at Jules’ rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

She takes over her sister’s home office and plans just to stay for a short while until she can find her own place.

Poppy has tried to kill herself and has picked up shoplifting for fun, but she seems to be on the mend emotionally. She, like much of her generation, is highly socially conscious, refusing to let her sister buy a SodaStream because she “doesn’t want to support Israeli apartheid.” She doesn’t have a job but is convinced she can get one and afford the rent on her own place, or else get their parents to subsidize it.

Jules, the narrator, knows better. Jules is somewhat stably employed as an editor for a publishing company that produces study guides similar to SparkNotes, and has a boyfriend with “an MFA in poetry and half a Ph.D. in poetry.”

“He pretends he knows things about wine and I let him. I pretend I know things about Russian literature and he lets me. It’s all very tentative,” Jules says. In her spare time, Jules obsesses over Mormon mommy blogs and picks fights with them in the comments. She calls them her mommies.

Her real mother, and Poppy’s, practices Messianic Judaism, just started an Instagram account (zero followers) and argues with her daughters about whether police are bad or good and is prone to texting them a thumbs-down emoji when they say something she doesn’t like.

“I don’t understand why the three of us can’t ever just have, like, a nice conversation,” Jules says to Poppy, discussing their mother. “Not even a conversation, just a moment even. What’s her deal with us? Why doesn’t she like us?”

“Oh,” Poppy says without looking up, “it’s because she’s a narcissist and we’re her appendages. It says so in the trauma book.”

Soon it becomes clear that Poppy will not be moving out anytime soon, and to the delight of their father, a dermatologist who is always telling his daughters what cosmetic work they need to have done (and does it free), they settle down to housekeeping together. They even adopt a three-legged rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar.

This is the point where there should be some rising story arc, some crisis, some Thelma-and-Louise-esque trip. Astonishingly, there is not. Worry is essentially a book full of snappy dialogue and stream-of-consciousness observations of one millennial and one zoomer. Poppy and Jules are an Algonquin Round Table that seats two.

While they both have dreams — Jules has an MFA and still aspires to be a “real” writer — they are locked in anxiety, self-consciousness and a never-ending loop of videos on the internet that end badly, from 9/11 to a zoo panda’s death. This leads to a conversation about whether watching videos like that changes a person.

Poppy argues yes: “There is a before and after of me watching this video, you know? There’s the me who hadn’t chosen to watch the video, and there’s the me who did. And I’m not the old me anymore.”

To which Jules replies: “The Internet isn’t real, it isn’t experience. It’s moving dots.”

But when Jules ventures out into the real world to watch a writer lecture at a museum, and another young woman tries to befriend her, she refuses to engage and spirals into self-pity. “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer,” she says to herself.

Tanner disguises the seriousness underlying the women’s unhappiness with her light, comic touch. When, for example, a high-school drama friend reaches out to Jules, Jules admits, “It thrills me to see that she is not working as an actress, that she’s working in nonprofits — the fate of the unremarkable — and that she’s the annoying kind of married where she has her wedding date, bookended with hearts, in her little bio box.”

But Tanner throws the readers under a bus with an emotionally challenging ending that is a sharp and unexpected departure from her modus operandi up to that point. It’s as if she’d been serving cotton candy, and then suddenly left the room and came back with fried alligator. But by that point, it’s too late for the reader to bail.

Worry is, in essence, an anxious monologue that will resonate most with young, under-employed, over-educated Americans who live in large cities on the coasts. B

Album Reviews 24/05/16

Unearthly Rites, Ecdysis (Prosthetic Records)

You know, I don’t know if I’ve ever reviewed an album from the Prosthetic imprint in this space, but they’ve stuffed my emailbox for so long now that it’d be weird if I didn’t hear from them. It’s like that viral video that made the rounds a few months ago, where a little boy’s getting off the school bus and an all-black chicken comes running over to him to get hugs; Prosthetic is one of my favorite hug-seeking chickens, so let’s do this thing. If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re talking about a death metal band, one that comes to us “from the death metal caves of Finland,” and this is their first full-length. They love to brag about their DIY roots, which are verified through their really raw overall sound, which one critic didn’t like, but I do: It’s very punky, folks, just a dilapidated wall of hate atop which sits a workable-enough singer who does a fine Cookie Monster imitation. For what it is, it’s awesome. A-

High On Fire, Cometh The Storm (MNRK Heavy Records)

The mainstream rock press’s love for this mud-metal band has mystified me since the release of their first album, never you mind how long ago it was. I know some people love them some Motorhead, and I appreciate that, but that’s what ex-Sleep guitarist Matt Pike and his boys have always sounded like to me, Motorhead with a side of — well, nothing else really. By the way, they won a Best Metal Performance Grammy in 2019, the last time they could be bothered to put out an album, which speaks more to the distracted, half-informed mindset of the Grammy people than anything else, but let’s get to this one, which opens in fine fettle with “Lambsbread,” a riff clinic that sounds like Motorhead crossed with early Slayer, then the distinctly Crowbar-like grind-a-thon “Burning Down,” which does peg the coolometer. Bassist Jeff Matz (formerly with Zeke) adds some trippiness to the proceedings, specifically by playing a Turkish lute, so some of this sounds like Motorhead playing with Ravi Shankar. OK, anyway, there we are, Motorhead, um I mean High On Fire everyone. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hoo-rah, look alive guys, the May 17 music-CD drop-date, and look at this, I’m already out of my element, because the first thing I have to deal with in these proceedings is a new album from Cage the Elephant, called Neon Pill! I am one of those professional music journalists who was sent the first Cage The Elephant album and thought it was boring and stupid, which led to a 20-year journey of having no friends, but it was worth it just to see the look on people’s faces. I still don’t get it, and I still don’t like this band or Portugal [curiously placed period] The Man either. But one of my associates really likes Cage The Elephant, and so for them (because I really, really care) I will heretofore forthwith proceed to put my current stomach contents at risk by listening to their new single to see if they’re still the emperor’s new clothes of skinny-jeans bands. Are y’all ready, that’d be great. OK, so I’m now reporting to you live from YouTube, guys, where I’m about to listen to the title track. Uh oh, wait, is this actually Cage The Whatever, or is it Guster? It sure sounds like Guster, talk about boring. Wait, this just in, folks, there’s some skronky noise in the mix, probably added so people would think the song’s important, but it’s better than nothing. Once again, I’m Eric Saeger, everyone, and this is “Listening To Really Pointless Music.”

• Carefully manufactured fashion-victimizer Billie Eilish is still around, being an unintelligible one-person Insane Clown Posse and doing annoying stuff like resembling my least favorite ex, and plus making albums, like her new one, Hit Me Hard And Soft! No, I don’t mind Billie Eilish, if people want to believe the record company’s story about how they found her in a Dumpster eating stale saltines or whatever the deal was, I cannot prevent them from falling for marketing ploys, but either way, let’s trudge back over to the YouTunes to see what’s going on with this ridiculous post-postmodern whatever. So, dum de dum, let’s see, here’s a tune from the new album, called “Chihiro.” She is half-whisper-singing, of course, because that’s her brand, heaven forbid she should just sing like a normal — wait, hold it guys, this is just a bunch of snippets from the song, because she knows all the 9-year-olds who listen to her would just pirate the tune through YouTubeToMP3, isn’t that clever? The song is slow, with an upbeat afterparty vibe, sort of like if Sade were a 15-year-old who smoked cigarettes and skipped school a lot. We’re just plain doomed, fam.

• There are a lot of albums for me to ignore this week, look at ’em all. There’s massively annoying ’90s person Ani DiFranco’s Unprecedented Sh!t; massively boring Canadian indie band Of Montreal with some stupid album, who cares what it’s called; and get this, guys, smirking nepo baby actress Kate Hudson is putting out an album titled Glorious, for some reason, which I only mention so you don’t accidentally buy it at Strawberries or Service Merchandise or who even knows where you’re supposed to buy albums now! Jeez Louise, everyone’s putting out an album this week, including mummified ’90s boyband New Kids on the Block, with their new one, Still Kids!

• And finally, it’s Portishead singer Beth Gibbons, with her new LP, Lives Outgrown! She of course is a trip-hop goddess, so there will probably be nothing to dislike about this. Yup, nope, “Reaching Out” has some really cool samples, a Florence Welch part, just badass stuff that you should listen to.

Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis

Daniel Lewis is a tree nerd, and I say that affectionately, from one tree nerd to another. By this, I mean my house is filled with odd pieces of wood collected in forests and on beaches for no reason other than the beauty I see in their gnarled and twisty forms. Lewis, however, is the guy who could probably identify the type of tree these bits of wood come from and then launch into a lecture on the genus of the tree and its prospects for survival on a warming planet.

An environmental historian and college professor who lives in Southern California, Lewis has built his latest book around 12 trees he finds most interesting and important. Disappointingly, although New Hampshire is the second most forested state in the U.S. according to the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands, the 12 do not include the sugar maple, Eastern hemlock or any other of the most prevalent trees in New England.

Lewis’s picks are a disparate tribe flung around the planet — in some cases, literally, by seed dispersal. They include the bristlecone pine, the coast redwood, the East Indian sandalwood tree, the African baobab, the blue gum eucalyptus and the olive tree. Each tree gets its own chapter, in which Lewis tells stories about the tree’s history, its uses and abuses by humans, and its outlook. Along the way, he ventures merrily off the beaten path in order to share nuggets of information he has gleaned during his research.

As an example, Lewis wanted to confirm that products of the olive tree, which mainly grows in the Mediterranean and in California, are found on all the continents. So he tracked down the person in charge of supplying food to the largest year-round encampment in the Antarctic, and we subsequently learn how the 150 to 900 people at the McMurdo Station are fed. Food is delivered there just once a year, in January or February, and it sounds like they eat better there than many of us do. “When you’re stuck in a vast, tree-free tract of wind-driven snow and ice, you need good olives and their oil. Green, black, and Kalamata olives are the three varieties usually on hand. Olive oil and olives are also a staple for their pizza station, which bakes up sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand pizzas annually,” Lewis writes.

Due to the popularity of its drupe — that is the new word we learn for pitted fruits like the olive, peach or apricot — the actual olive tree doesn’t get as much attention in its chapter as the other 11 trees, as Lewis delves mainly into the production of olive oil. The demand for olive oil is so great that just 10 percent of harvested olives are consumed as olives; the rest is pressed into oil in a mind-bogglingly complex and regulated process that explains why the product is so expensive.

More focus on the tree itself is given in chapters of two threatened species of trees: the African baobab (you might not recognize the name, but Google it, and you will most likely recognize the tree) and the toromiro tree, once common on a Pacific island.

The African baobab is a source of water to elephants during times of drought, which is interesting, because the baobab, for reasons scientists can’t explain, stores much more water than an individual tree needs for itself. But as tempting as it is to think that the tree is, on some level, being helpful to elephants or other living things with its excess hydration, it is the elephants’ violent assault on the trees to obtain water that is contributing to the trees’ demise.

Equally interesting is the story of what Lewis calls “the nearly lost tree of Rapa Nui.”

Rapa Nui is the Pacific island more commonly known as Easter Island. It was once resplendent with the Sophora toromiro, which doesn’t have a common name or nickname like other trees and is simply known (by the tree nerds who pay attention to it) as the toromiro.

The toromiro is a small flowering tree that was part of a “painful drop in biodiversity” after humans arrived there around the 12th century. In the case of the toromiro, however, its gradual decline wasn’t all human-driven; Lewis explains how other factors were likely at play, including dozens of devastating tsunamis that have hit the island over time. But the trees were harvested too, for firewood and building material. By the 1600s wood was so scarce on the island that it became the most valuable commodity there, Lewis writes. Even driftwood was “precious.”

Today, more than six decades after the last toromiro tree mysteriously disappeared from the island, attempts are being made to re-introduce the tree to the island from toromiros found growing elsewhere, the seeds carried by birds or ocean currents. It’s not as easy as just planting seedlings. The soil composition has changed so much that cultivated trees have not yet taken root.

These are the sorts of stories that make Twelve Trees an unexpectedly fascinating read, although it’s not necessarily the sort of book that you’d recommend, for example, to your Bruins-obsessed neighborhood. It’s a book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, and would appeal most to those who think businesses should close for Arbor Day. (April 26 this year, in case you didn’t know.)

While Twelve Trees has its “Bueller? Bueller?” moments — most notably when Lewis delivers what is best described as a rapturous ode to lichens — it will make you think that maybe you care more about trees than you know. B

Album Reviews 24/05/09

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department (Republic Records)

In case you’re new to this planet, the patriarchal establishment wants women to be obedient second-class citizens, focused on tedious, badly matched, purely sexual relationships, like 11-year-olds experiencing first crushes. That’s what this album accomplishes. It’s about private, individualist, closeted empowerment for enduring all the horribleness all women experience on a daily basis, and in that, it’s not the call to arms that the gender actually needs in a time of ever-dwindling rights for women. I will say that at least the record isn’t as embarrassingly hormonal as what Adele puts out, which is who TayTay’s trying to undercut with this stuff. Musically it’s decent, largely composed of hypnotic, post-coital musings that are a lot less grown-up than Tay (read: her producers, who write all this stuff) thinks they are. The melodic verisimilitude hides itself under “hmm, what’s that sample” moments and controlled bursts of primal, from-the-mountaintop, wild-woman battle cries signifying nothing. A-

Good Morning, Good Morning Seven (Polyvinyl Records)

Not only did Rolling Stone compare this Australian duo quite favorably to fellow Aussie bands Royel Otis and Budjerah; they went so far as to declare them the “future of music.” Hyperbolic much, I know, but they’re hitting the road with Waxahatchee soon, which should be a good fit. This LP opens with “Arcade,” which has a swampy-ethereal ambiance to it, techno-cheese and reverb-smothered vocals conjuring a half-plugged Kings Of Leon collaborating with Air, something of that sort. “Monster Of The Week” is like a more muscular Chris Isaak, for want of any better comparison. In that regard it’s definitely booze-soaked and faraway, an interesting but acquired taste that wouldn’t prompt me to yammer something like “the future of music” but definitely the type of thing that’ll please listeners who like their tuneage Pink Floyd-slow. A-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yippee-ki-yay, my little trolls, it’s the May 10 music-CD drop date and I can’t wait to preview all the hot new songs that’ll be playing at the Fun-Ride Center in downtown Old Orchard Beach during the summer! I haven’t even gone to the mall to buy my swimsuit attire yet, would day-glo green look good on me, please be honest! But there’s some hum-ding-dang-er butt-kickers coming at us this week, fam, so let me put aside this “Swimsuit Attire For 2024’s Hot Guys” catalog and go check it out (when I was in my 20s I used to troll people by saying that the Nashua Chamber of Commerce asked me to be Mr. October in the “Men Of Nashua” calendar and no one ever laughed, so I must have been quite the cutie back when I still had to take dating seriously, so don’t be sending laughing emojis to me on my social media, it won’t work). Holy catfish, not a lot of new albums this week, but the ones that are on my super-secret list of new albums seem pretty interesting. In fact, let’s start with totally edgy Scottish slowcore/post-rock band Arab Strap, I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A F— Anymore. I don’t know, these guys are usually mentioned in the same breath as Swans and the Throbbing Lobster family of musical products and such, but I’ve never taken the plunge all the way with them. But I will try doing that today, bear with me a second while I listen to the new single, “Bliss.” Right, so the video has some girl doing a weird interpretive dance to a noisy-ish beat, and the singer sounds like Iggy Pop in mellow mode. It makes me want to say it sounds like Simple Minds doing krautrock, but that might inspire readers to go check it out, which isn’t my intention at all.

• Uh oh, look out, millennials, it’s your favorite arena-folk band, Kings of Leon, with a new album, titled Can We Please Have Fun. Wait, just a second, this just in: Yes, roger that, the band’s last album, whatever its name was, was so terrible that Kings Of Leon is no longer the favorite band of any generation. In that, they’re like Mastodon and Trent Reznor, a band that sold out and let the dummies at the record label take artistic control of their, you know, artistry. Oh, definitely, I’m sure this will be just scintillating stuff, let’s go listen to the advance cut, “Mustang,” and see what the dilly is with these jive turkeys. Ugh, so gross, it sounds like Pavement at the beginning, but then it gets a little more boisterous, and then the singing Hollowill brother starts rocking out to a not very catchy part. It does have a pulse to it and will probably be a lot cooler when they play it live, but at first listen it’s not as great as their earlier hit, the one with the Millennial Whoop in it, you know, the decent one.

• Oh, please stop, what’s this, it’s hair-rock children’s-party-clown Sebastian Bach, even he has a new album, and this one’s called Child Within The Man! Now I feel compelled to find out what he’s been doing since his “acting stint” on Gilmore Girls, do you guys even remember that, or did your brain work properly and erase it the way brains are supposed to work when you get abducted by aliens or watch Gilmore Girls? The single, “Everybody Bleeds,” is hair-metal-y but old ’Bastian wants it to be kind of Alice in Chains-ish, so it’s not too — wait, what’s he doing with the high voice thing, stop that this instant.

• And finally we have How to Dress Well, the stage name of Colorado’s Tom Krell. His new album, I Am Toward You, includes a decent neo-AOR tune, “New Confusion.” He sings like trip-hop superstar Jose Gonzalez on this pretty, fractal-filled joint, it’s cool.

Funny Story, by Emily Henry

& How to End a Love Story, by Yulin Kuang

Funny Story, by Emily Henry (Berkley, 400 pages)

How to End a Love Story, by Yulin Kuang (Avon, 384 pages)

I was interested in reading Yulin Kuang’s debut novel, How to End a Love Story, after finding out that Kuang is the adapting screenwriter for People We Meet on Vacation and the writer/director for Beach Read, both upcoming movies based on novels by Emily Henry. And since it was released just weeks before Henry’s latest, Funny Story (already on my must-read list), I decided to read them both and compare these purportedly funny love stories.

How to End a Love Story is a solid debut — but I could see it being better as a movie (which makes sense given Kuang’s experience as a film writer). I have to wonder if perhaps some solid acting could make me believe the whole premise of the book.

Because here’s my biggest hang-up: The reason that main characters Helen and Grant “can’t” be together is stupid. I could not, at any point, wrap my head around this “enemies to lovers” plot when there was absolutely no reason for them to be enemies in the first place.

Helen’s sister was killed in a tragic accident 13 years ago. Grant was behind the wheel of the car that killed her. (No spoiler here — this is explained on page 2). The fact is, no one was at fault, no one was to blame, and it’s just not OK that Helen hates Grant for this thing he had no control over. I get that being around him might be difficult, but to straight up despise his existence and make him feel like he did something wrong really made me dislike her. And it’s hard to be invested in, let alone root for, a character you don’t like.

Also, she’s pretty uptight, and it was hard to reconcile that with the setting and other characters in the book. Helen is a popular YA author and has just started working in the writers’ room of the book series’ TV adaptation (clearly Kuang took the “write what you know” notion and ran with it). The writers’ room environment is rowdy and raunchy, and Helen doesn’t fit in.

It’s almost uncomfortable to see Helen’s interactions with these fun, indelicate people — and then watch her slowly become “one of them.” It seems disingenuous and awkward (again, maybe onscreen an actor could portray this transformation more naturally than my imagination was allowing for).

Meanwhile, Grant is an experienced film writer, well-respected and confident in the room but less so outside of it, as he still struggles with the anxieties that have plagued him since the aforementioned tragic accident.

Alas, Helen and Grant must work together, and of course it’s so hard at first, but then it’s not so much, and then there are some unfortunate moments of passion that can’t go any further because it’s just not OK, fundamentally, because of this thing that happened 13 years ago that was no one’s fault.

If you can wrap your head around all of that in a way that I couldn’t, you’ll probably enjoy this book. Certainly a lot of romance novels have their fair share of disbelievable elements — it’s just that they’re usually more eye-roll-inducing (just tell him how you feel already!) and less emotionally upsetting. But the writing is solid, particularly the dialogue, and it’s an interesting look at what goes on in a writers’ room and on a film set, knowing that Kuang has real-life experience there. C+

Funny Story was even better than I expected it to be. Henry had already proven that she is a master of women’s literature, with fun, real characters, unique but believable storylines, and just the right amount of heat. And in Funny Story, her dialogue shines, sharp and witty as always.

One of many random examples (the context doesn’t even matter):

“‘I thought you were bringing a date,’ I say to Jules. ‘That guy you just went to Chicago with?’

‘Ryan.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘He cut his fingernails on the bus ride.’

‘Ew,’ Ashleigh and I say in unison.

Julia nods solemnly. ‘Flags so red, they veered toward maroon.’”

The “I” in the above example is Daphne, who is engaged to Peter, who decides just before the wedding that he actually loves Petra, his childhood best friend, who was engaged to Miles, who becomes Daphne’s new roommate and fake boyfriend after the respective breakups. Got that? (Jules, in case you’re wondering, is Miles’s sister, and Ashleigh is Daphne’s co-worker and, once Daphne lightens up a bit at work, her new best friend. Both add a well-balanced mix of fun and emotional complexity to the plot.)

And there is emotional complexity here; this isn’t all fluff and love, and I don’t think I rolled my eyes once. Funny Story is definitely funny, but it’s so much more than that, too: It’s a story of human relationships and all of the messiness and intensity that come along with them, how they can start and end in the most unpredictable ways, and how we all have the capacity to overcome heartbreak and learn to love again. A

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