I recently read the BookTok-beloved Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman. This book was a very interesting, ambitious sort of celebrity romance. In it, Chani, a reporter, writes about her weekend with Gabe Parker. The article propels them into new levels of fame and the book itself contains the article where she writes the actual events of the weekend that transpired and documents the weekend they spend in the present day 10 years later, sort of reliving the weekend that they had 10 years ago, trying to rekindle the chemistry they had then, and also trying to map out how that article changed the trajectory of their lives.

I think it is very fascinating as a novel, but the more I think about the book itself, the more I struggled with it as a romance. My biggest critic is the random artifacts that are interspersed through the novel such as gossip columns, blog posts, and articles. I think they were just not as interesting as they could have been. They didn’t tell us enough about the characters to actually be worthwhile. 

My other issue is that I feel like I came to the end of the novel and wasn’t super compelled by the happily ever after because I didn’t feel like I knew who Chani was, despite the fact that she is the main character and the main narrator of the novel. Because she is a reporter, she has a tendency to report to us as readers, so we are constantly being told about the world as she sees it, but we’re not really being told a whole lot about her as a person. 

By the end of the novel I had this really beautiful sense of who Gabe Parker is as a celebrity and a public figure, but also as a person who she has come to very intimately know. We know about his family, his ambitions, his past, his present, and his potential future. We know how attentive he is to her, and how interested he is in his profession. We really got to see him grow and change throughout the book. I didn’t feel like I got even a fraction of that care afforded to her. I got no details about her family or hobbies, and very little detail about her friends. 

Overall, very little attention was given to her life outside of her affection for Gabe. It is unfortunate that we don’t really understand why Gabe is as into her as she is into him. The story felt very one-sided.

Putting aside my strong criticism for this book, I did think that the characters were really well thought out and there was a lot of depth to them. I just wish we could have learned more about Chani. There was also a lot of inner monologue which was a lot of fun to read through.

I understand what the writer was trying to do, but I just feel like she missed her mark for the potential that it could have been. By the end of the book I wasn’t even sure why the main characters liked each other because it felt like there was no tension. Overall I would only rate this book 2.5 stars.