Book Whore

“Life Is Funny” by E. R. Frank

“Life Is Funny” is one of the those books that once you’ve read it you just have to turn around and read it again because you realize how tightly it is all twisted together and how much you have might of missed the first go through. This young adult novel is set in Brooklyn, New York and covers the stories a slew of different children—the rich and mostly poor, the educated and streetwise, the white, black, and Hispanic children of the public school system and how life is funny—in how it ties together, in all the places it can take you and in everything that is common to the human experience.

E.R. Frank manages to patchwork together a tale of gritty reality and wild escapism with relative ease—from pretty models to victims of the social service system—without ever making you question the hows and whys of these characters knowing each other. It has a “Tales of the City” quality to it in how it makes you believe life is special and hard and ever so worth it and that every corner of Brooklyn has a story that is not only important but special and worth savoring.

What is most amazing of all is how “Life Is Funny” makes it’s characters so real and fun—especially for a young adult book—and how invested you get in who they are and who they are making up to be. I don’t think there has been another couple that has captured me as much as Gingerbread and Keisha in recent history—I found myself caring and rooting for these two teens more than I do in most ‘adult’ novels. There is a sense of universal humanity in these kids, something that we all have and which allows you to believe, know and want the best for each of them well after the end of the novel.

It’s a rare moment in current literature for a story to want to work on so many levels—economic, racial, educational and even sexual—much less for an American young adult novel but it is even rarer that “Life Is Funny” does just that. And if that’s not a reason to pick up a book then I don’t know what is.