Funny Girl

Starred review from January 12, 2015
Barbara Parker of 1960s Blackpool is a big fish in a small pondâbeautiful, astute, and with aspirations of making it in television like her idol Lucille Ball. Upon moving to London, Barbara changes her name to Sophie and gets her big break. She walks in to an audition she's not suited for and leaves with the writers excited to pen a show specifically for her. The majority of Hornby's clever novel follows Sophie and her creative circle of friends through the success of the subsequent program on BBC. There's Clive, Barbara's foppish costar, Tony and Bill, the bantering and bickering writing partners who pen each episode, and Dennis, the producer who alternately fights for their program's creative direction and struggles to hide his growing fondness for Sophie, a woman he believes is completely out of his league. Hornby wonderfully captures the voice and rhythms of broadcast television of the time, and seems to delight in endless inversions of art imitating life imitating art, his characters inspiring and feeding upon the storylines they produce. The result is a delightful collection of characters that care as much as they harm, each struggling to determine who they want to be.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Art and life are intertwined in a novel about TV sitcoms set during the cultural sea change of the 1960s.Hornby's (Juliet, Naked, 2009, etc.) most ambitious novel to date extends his passion for pop culture and empathy for flawed characters in to the world of television comedy. From her girlhood days in working-class Blackpool, Barbara Parker idolizes Lucille Ball and dreams of emulating her. Yet such a career seems impossible to a young woman whose closest brush with upward mobility comes when she wins a local beauty contest-then quickly abdicates her crown, realizing it would tie her closer to home rather than provide a ticket out. She realizes she has to go to London, a city where she has no connections or realistic prospects and where she discovers "that she wasn't as lovely as she had been in Blackpool; or, rather, her beauty was much less remarkable here." There's one thing that makes her stand out from the other lovely girls, though: "She was pretty sure...that none of [them] wanted to make people laugh." Through a series of chance encounters that seem like destiny, she does achieve her dreams, getting cast on a popular BBC comedy and even meeting Lucy, who "looked old, though, in the way that a ghost looks old." It's the supporting characters who really enrich this novel-the producer/director whose devotion to his star is more than professional; the gay writers who are initially semicloseted and whose paths will diverge; the male star whom this newcomer-now dubbed Sophie Straw-quickly eclipses. Hornby makes the reader care for his characters as much as he does and retains a light touch with the deeper social implications, as women, gays, popular entertainment and the culture in general experience social upheaval. Years later, Sophie is getting ready to star in a play that's intended to revive her career. "The play is much better than I thought it was going to be," she thinks. "It's funny, and sad-like life." And like this novel.

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December 15, 2014
Barbara Parker is crowned Miss Blackpool in 1964 and promptly returns the tiara. She doesn't want to be a beauty queen; she wants to be Britain's answer to Lucille Ball. In short order, she moves to London and auditions for a BBC television program, where she meets a creative, witty production team. Taken with her good lucks and impeccable comic timing, they fashion the program around her, and Barbara (and Jim) becomes a huge hit, emblematic of the shifting mores of a more modern Britain as the titular couple bicker about politics, class distinctions, and sex. In his seventh novel (and the first in five years), Hornby pens a homage to light entertainment, sending up the stodgier side of the BBC via snobby critic Vernon Whitfield. He also delivers a winning example of the form, crafting fast-paced, witty dialogue and lovable characters set against a time of creative breakthroughs, both in the culture and in the media. And the final chapters, in which the team must deal with the infirmities of age and illness, highlight Hornby's great gift for effortlessly moving from humor to heartbreak.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015

Barbara is a blonde bombshell who flees the Miss Blackpool pageant for London, intent on stardom as a comedienne like her idol Lucille Ball. A talent agent mistakes Barbara for a minor celebrity and has designs on transforming her into a glamour girl but realizes her broad northern accent is best suited for comedy after all. Hence, Sophie Straw is born. It's the early days of television and Sophie shows up for an audition in which she charms writers Bill and Tony (both closeted homosexuals, this is the 1960s) into writing a sitcom expressly for her. Producer Dennis is similarly smitten. They bring in Clive as Sophie's handsome, square conservative husband, Jim. Sophie plays a "beautiful, chippy, Labour-voting northerner," named Barbara. Their unlikely pairing becomes an instant hit for the BBC's light entertainment division. Chapters follow each successive season ("series," in British parlance), the show's eventual descent, and each of the main character's lives post-prime time. While the fictionalized historical parts are compelling, the overall tone is flat, and the characters lack dimension. VERDICT For a novel about comedy, the humor is off camera, implied but not evident. Hornby's (High Fidelity; About a Boy) usual spark is missing. A readable but melancholy and definitely not funny book. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014

This first new novel from Hornby in five years comes at an auspicious time: the film version of his Whitbread finalist, A Long Way Down, came out this summer; the NBC series About a Boy, based on his 1998 novel, is taking off; and he wrote the screenplay for the film version of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, which stars Reese Witherspoon. In this book, set in Sixties London, from-the-sticks Sophie Straw turns herself into a television starlet.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.