Reviews - Weird but Normal: Essays on the Awkward, Uncomfortable, Surprisingly Regular Parts of Being Human

164 reviews for:

Weird but Normal: Essays on the Awkward, Uncomfortable, Surprisingly Regular Parts of Being Human

Mia Mercado

3.59 AVERAGE

kelseylovesbooks's review

3.0

I enjoyed many of Mercado’s essays, but also found quite a few to be an attempt at satire that just didn’t land for me.

krayreads's review against another edition

2.0

a collection of essays by mia, a freelance write, on growing up bi-racial (half filipino!) in the midwest.

i did enjoy some parts of it. as i come from and still live in a very dominantly asian city, her anecdotes about growing up bi-racial in a predominantly white neighborhood were interesting.

however, her humor was at times over the top, cringey, and way too millenial for me (and i am, in fact, a millenial). i understand that she was trying to be relatable but it was forced and gave me second hand embarrassment. i actually skimmed through some of the essays that were basically just a bunch of bad puns and self-deprecating jokes that, if it were 2011, i probably would have enjoyed but not today. she also made it seem as if she experienced a lot of trauma/oppression but like...it's obvious she grew up just the same as us normal middle-class millennials? she went through a lot of things that i think most of us went through but tried to make it seem as if hers was a unique experience. girl where? i also didn't feel like there was really anything of particular importance that hasn't already been written by someone else (and better). i didn't learn anything new. it read more like a conversational memoir than what a true essay collection should have felt like. there was no depth at all.

i do however thing that if you want to relive or feel nostalgic to revisit the early 90's/y2k days, she definitely captured growing up in that era perfectly!

jordanbrady's review against another edition

3.0

A quick read. Parts were relatable and funny…but nothing groundbreaking here

doomcow's review against another edition

5.0

emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

editbarb's review against another edition

2.0

This is a perfectly cromulent book (probably a 2.5), another entry in the "Let's have a humor writer put together some autobiographical pieces and throw in some more 'general comedy' bits and call it a book." After reading some heavier fare, I was looking for a palate cleanser, and this did the job. As with other books in this genre, I wish she had nixed the more generic essays (addressing household items like they were women, defining clothing) and had delved in a bit more on some of the more personal topics. I wanted to know more about her job writing greeting cards (how is that not a comedy gold mine?) and growing up as half-Filipino in the Midwest, and her writing about women in the workplace was quite good. Going through her timeline of life on the Internet (screen names over the years) was pretty amusing to someone who was thankfully not an adolescent when she wrote her first blog. But I got frustrated at how she jumped around in time (discussing dating apps after mentioning her husband) and seemed to gloss over a bunch of topics that were ripe for discussion.

Goodreads says that 2 stars is "It was OK," and that was pretty much this book. Mercado can tell a story fairly well, but I just wish she focused on different things.