Funny Story

Funny Story begins with a setup I would reject as too neat, then makes the untidy aftermath feel entirely human.

Your fiancé leaves you for his childhood best friend. Her former boyfriend has a spare room. Naturally you move in and become a shining example of mature restraint. If my eyes rolled at that arrangement, they stopped when Emily Henry let Daphne and Miles be embarrassed, cross, funny, and occasionally generous in ways that did not flatter them. The premise is engineered. The feelings are not.

I found this one easier to live inside than Henry's more melancholy holiday stories. It has a house, a town, and a heroine discovering that the life she built around someone else might contain a few rooms of her own. The revenge impulse is the bait. The rebuilding is the reason I stayed. Also, Miles is the kind of man who makes a reader suspicious of every charming man she has ever dismissed as unserious.

The premise (no spoilers past the roommates' plan)

Daphne's fiancé Peter decides he is in love with his childhood friend Petra, leaving Daphne stranded in his lakeside hometown, Waning Bay, Michigan. Daphne works as a children's librarian and has little local support. She proposes sharing a home with Petra's former partner, Miles Nowak, the one person who understands the absurd geometry of this breakup. He is scruffy, easygoing, and apparently far less orderly than Daphne. At first they mostly keep out of each other's way. Then a fragile friendship and a plan take shape: they will let photographs of their summer together suggest rather more than the truth.

The lie is public enough to be tempting, private enough to become dangerous. That is all the early machinery you need. I will leave its later complications where they belong.

What works

Henry grasps the humiliation built into a breakup that other people can narrate more charmingly than you can. Daphne has been made a supporting character in Peter and Petra's grand account of themselves. Rather than granting her instant liberation, the novel lets her feel awkward in her own town, job, and home. Her pride is bruised. Her practicality, usually a strength, cannot organise its way out of being hurt. That is funny at times and lonely at others, which feels right.

The roommate arrangement gives the romance unusually good pacing. Sharing space is not the same as trusting someone in it. Small domestic accommodations can do more work than a spectacular declaration, because they require attention on a Tuesday when nobody is performing for an audience. Henry uses that rhythm well. Daphne and Miles begin with a shared grievance, but the book is patient about giving them interests and loyalties beyond it. A couple should have something to discuss after the revenge photographs have ceased to amuse them.

The local setting also matters. Waning Bay is more than Peter's property in Daphne's mind, even though that is how she first experiences it. The question of whether she can belong somewhere without belonging to him gives the book its emotional spine. I like romances that allow the heroine a town as well as a man. There is a dignity in watching her build a life whose address no longer depends on somebody else's choice.

Miles is written against Daphne's first impression without becoming a secret prince of impeccable competence. Henry knows that laid-back can mean warmth and it can mean evasion; the reader has to keep measuring which version is present. That makes his appeal active rather than merely atmospheric. He is attractive because he notices people, and because the novel asks what that attentiveness costs him. A dishevelled man with a playlist is pleasant. A dishevelled man who can make room for another person's sorrow is a problem for my standards.

What's polarising

The deceptive photographs are the book's broadest device and the least interesting thing in it. They produce momentum, but I never believed a staged appearance mattered as much as Henry needed it to. The deeper stakes are Daphne's loneliness and Miles's unsettled place in his own story. Whenever the plot returns to the outward performance, I wanted it to lower its voice so those quieter problems could be heard.

The other risk is how easily kindness can look like a cure. Miles is good company, and the town gradually offers Daphne more than the life Peter curated for her. That is satisfying, but emotional recovery is not usually as cooperative as a well arranged romance plot. Henry gives the hurt time, though there were moments when I wanted her to let an awkward feeling remain unresolved for another page instead of finding the exact right exchange to soften it.

Finally, if you come hoping for two people scheming against their exes with glorious pettiness, this book will be less wicked than the setup implies. I liked that restraint. Revenge is a poor foundation for a romance, and Henry knows it. The early comic promise nevertheless oversells how much of the book wants to misbehave.

The Miles Nowak of it

Miles's appeal is not that he rescues Daphne from Peter's story. He is caught in the same ridiculous story and refuses to make it the only account of either of them. There is a lovely asymmetry in that: Daphne initially needs a place to stay; Miles offers one without possessing the certainty to explain what comes next. Their friendship can begin because neither has to pretend to be fully healed for the other's benefit.

He also provides a useful challenge to Daphne's habit of classifying people quickly. She is observant, but observation under stress can become a defence brief. Miles is not the category his messy presentation suggests. Nor should his gentleness exempt him from scrutiny. Henry lets the attraction grow through revised judgments on both sides, which is more compelling than a sudden revelation that the wronged roommate was perfect all along.

Spice and heat

The heat is 3 of 5, open door. There is on-page intimacy, and the publisher's quoted coverage calls this one of Henry's steamier romances, but the build remains as important as the physical payoff. The scenes are woven into a story about permission to want something after public rejection. That makes the intimacy feel emotionally specific rather than simply scheduled.

The content to keep in mind is romantic betrayal, a broken engagement, and the social sting of being left behind. The tone is warm and often comic, yet the book takes Daphne's disorientation seriously. It does not ask you to laugh at the fact that she is hurt.

Who it's for

Read Funny Story if you want forced proximity with actual domestic texture, a heroine whose job matters, and a charming man who has to prove he is more than a pleasant first impression. It is especially good for readers who like a romance to make room for new friendships and a renewed sense of home. The exes start the plot; Daphne's choices carry it.

Leave it aside if a fabricated public romance makes you impatient on principle. I share the impatience and still liked this book enormously. It earns the right to be more interesting than its stunt.

Books like Funny Story

• The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary, for a clever roommate arrangement that turns practical shelter into intimacy.
• You, Again by Kate Goldbeck, for two bruised people whose reluctant friendship becomes the more interesting plot.
• Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn, for a less obvious companion about going home, sharing space, and discovering what you want after serving someone else's plans.

Henry's sharpest joke is that Daphne's supposed fresh start begins in the least dignified way imaginable. Her kindest decision is to let that be only the beginning. I would return to Waning Bay for Miles, but I would stay to see what Daphne does with a life no one else gets to narrate for her.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Miles Nowak is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Miles Nowak