Yet again, I’m really not sure why I picked this book, other than it kept getting recommended to me based on other things I’ve read. I couldn’t really get into The Office, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, or Bridesmaids, and I really don’t know anything else about the author other than her roles. That said, I was looking for a new audiobook and this became available and I went for it.
This book was a slog for me. I just could not get into the folksy, “aww gee” awkwardness that was read with so.much.enthusiasm! and I felt like I could hear her winking through my speakers. The titular essay about the squirrels was just so strange that I didn’t understand why it needed to be saved for posterity and then distributed to the masses. I appreciated some of the stories about her time working on her tv shows, because I think I’m always going to be interested in learning about how things work in Hollywood, but the amount of content that I enjoyed was vastly outweighed by things that I found annoying and over the top.
All of that being said, I’m grateful for this audiobook for exactly one reason. It provided a bonding experience for me with my kid. We often ride in my car in silence, because between me and the two kids, we can rarely find something that all of us can tolerate at the same time, with my son being the most likely to lose it if something doesn’t suit his tastes. I picked the kids up from an activity and this audio book was still playing and my son asked if I would leave it on so he could keep listening, and asked me to wait to listen to more until we drove to school the following morning so he could keep up with the story. The chapters that I got to listen to with him were a little more tolerable, and I’m thankful that even if *I* didn’t like the stories, it provided him with a female narrator that he could listen to and be interested in.