Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by 3mmers
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Yes, this book is a type specimen for the surprisingly prolific genre of literary fiction about burnt out cynical editors in New York having crises of faith about their careers and relationships (if female, if male they are cheating on their partners), but, controversially, I liked it. This was the low stakes, sparkling prose, relationship drama that I expected from Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors.
I've written before about the mysterious sauce that infests books about New York - the way they seem blissfully unaware that other large cosmopolitan cities equally as interested as New York exist in many places across the world. This is absolutely another one of those, luxuriating in the specialness of the big apple in a way that is incomprehensible to anyone that doesn't live there and scrabbling to reconcile the fact that the kind of young and interesting creative that you write books about hasn't been able to afford to live in New York for (checks publication date) almost thirty years. I'm much more willing to forgive this than I was its spiritual sisters Cleopatra and Frankenstein or The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney because it is also extremely funny.
The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing succeeds in implementing the kind of self-consciously showy prose that is both obviously trying very hard and compulsively extremely readable. Additionally, it accomplishes a genuinely difficult feat: it is a heartfelt book about a funny woman. I'm not sure why funny women are so difficult to write, even for female authors. Maybe there's still an internalized hostility to a woman that outshines the men around her, or some sort of authorial resistance to go all in on a female character that is goofy or crass as well as smart. It's a lot easier to find female characters that are funny because they are sarcastic, perhaps because sarcasm is a lower bar or because the badass female sidekick is an established archetype. This book captures the indescribable flow of wittiness. I'm having a hard time describing it because it absolutely nails the territory of joke that you just had to be there for, something that you laughed hysterically at in the moment but find yourself unable to compellingly recount later on.
It was also reassuring to see that the chance to have an ambiguously exploitative relationship with a much older male creative, thereby seeding the content for my own literary fiction bestseller, has not passed me by, even at the geriatric age of 27.
I've written before about the mysterious sauce that infests books about New York - the way they seem blissfully unaware that other large cosmopolitan cities equally as interested as New York exist in many places across the world. This is absolutely another one of those, luxuriating in the specialness of the big apple in a way that is incomprehensible to anyone that doesn't live there and scrabbling to reconcile the fact that the kind of young and interesting creative that you write books about hasn't been able to afford to live in New York for (checks publication date) almost thirty years. I'm much more willing to forgive this than I was its spiritual sisters Cleopatra and Frankenstein or The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney because it is also extremely funny.
The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing succeeds in implementing the kind of self-consciously showy prose that is both obviously trying very hard and compulsively extremely readable. Additionally, it accomplishes a genuinely difficult feat: it is a heartfelt book about a funny woman. I'm not sure why funny women are so difficult to write, even for female authors. Maybe there's still an internalized hostility to a woman that outshines the men around her, or some sort of authorial resistance to go all in on a female character that is goofy or crass as well as smart. It's a lot easier to find female characters that are funny because they are sarcastic, perhaps because sarcasm is a lower bar or because the badass female sidekick is an established archetype. This book captures the indescribable flow of wittiness. I'm having a hard time describing it because it absolutely nails the territory of joke that you just had to be there for, something that you laughed hysterically at in the moment but find yourself unable to compellingly recount later on.
It was also reassuring to see that the chance to have an ambiguously exploitative relationship with a much older male creative, thereby seeding the content for my own literary fiction bestseller, has not passed me by, even at the geriatric age of 27.
Content Warnings
Minor: Cancer