CBR 16 Bingo – Pride: LGBTQ+ author
“I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy”
I read this book for my book club in June, for pride month, since we try to plan our books in acordance to the different heritage months. We also try to have diversity in the types of books we choose, and we hadn’t had a graphic novel yet this year, so we ended up settling on Fun Home as our book.
Fun Home tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her late father, an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, who died in a mysterious way shortly after coming out to Alison.
This book was honestly just alright, to me. The classic literature references were kind of annoying, but that’s mostly because I haven’t read enough classical literature to understand most of them. However, since they were somewhat constant, it really hindered from my overall experience with the book.
I also wasn’t the biggest fan of her writing style because it felt somewhat ornamental and not particularly down-to-earth. However, the story as a whole was interesting, which helped make up for the writing style. Unfortunately, for me, a writing style that I don’t like can be really detrimental to a book, so even the storyline and the interesting way in which it was told wasn’t entirely redeemable for me.
3.5 stars, because it would be 3 but the storyline was good enough to give it that extra 0.5. At times, the book was enjoyable, but at times it was kind of a slog. Maybe it would be better if I knew more about classic literature, but even the references I did understand felt unnecessary.