Solutions and Other Problems

4.5 Thankful to have Allie back in my life. I'm still catching up on all of her personal backstory of the last 7 years that she's been sharing on FB, but much of what she went through is touched on here. There were a few stories that didn't work as well, but some were peak perfection - insightful, a little sad, brutally honest, and hilarious. Favorites were: Bucket, Cat, Fish Video, and the end essay, the uplifting gut punch of Friend.

I Love This Book!

An image appears, portraying a lonely country road with signs in the distance. The colours are dusty and muted, and handwritten atop is a simple truth. “The main conflicts in life are: food; power; what to do about the unavoidable realization that nothing is fair or means anything. I don't know what to do about these. I just wanted to tell you.”



Another image appears. In it, a half-cartoon, half-stick-figure woman hunches over in maniacal fashion, holding a banana with a face drawn on it. In the sky is a handwritten message: “If you can't win, start playing a different game and score just as many points.”



What do these things have in common? They're examples of how humour and honest exasperation with the world blend to create an entertaining and relatable experience in the form of a book that's half blog and half comic with a bit of novella sprinkled atop. This book is just... it's good. I could come up with a more elaborate term and try to be a pretentious book reviewer for this one, but it's 2020 and I'm exhausted. I don't need to sound pretentious. I just need to say: I absolutely love this book.

It's brilliant. It's fun. It's heartbreaking. It's relatable. It made me smile and laugh so hard my ribs hurt... and then it made me want to reach out and hug Allie (the author) because I felt as if I were reading the confessions of an estranged friend. She has been through so much in life, some of which I can relate to and some of which I luckily can't, and reading this book made me feel less alone.

For a brief time, I escaped the real world and entered a world populated by delightfully simple drawings which managed to convey paragraphs worth of exposition with things as simple as posture. Even the sad bits weren't overwhelming, as there were still threads of humour in the darkness.

I know this isn't a very elaborate review. You'll probably find some better ones elsewhere. And that's okay. Just know that I love this book so much that I'm proud to have pre-ordered it on a friend's recommendation. My literal only complaint is that the kindle edition is somewhat clunky and unattractively laid out, often requiring zooming on images to read them. I think that's a limitation of the format more than an oversight, so I'm not penalizing the rating.

And on that note, I leave you with one of the earliest bits I found laugh-out-loud funny. It comes after Allie has accidentally said ‘goog' instead of ‘good.'



If you're looking for a way to escape the world without completely leaving reality behind - a way to find humour in even the darkest of places and feel less alone - then I highly recommend this book.