Book #4 for the year is All My Friends are Dead by Avery Monsen and Jory John.

I ran across this strange little book in the Comedy aisle at Barnes and Noble. This isn’t an aisle that I peruse frequently, but I was with my husband and wandering the store, and the cover caught my eye. We proceeded to stand in the aisle and flip through the entire book, reading the whole thing. Not that this was much of a feat—most pages only had five or six words on them to begin with.

This is a funny book. Funny, sad, poignant, true. It conveys a lot of honesty and as the back of the book puts it, “existential crisis” of a lot of things, and of course by things, it reflects people. I really enjoyed this little book, even in its sadness and harsh realities about some things (like a guy sitting in front of a computer, saying that he has 3,284 friends, but never met any of them face to face). It made me laugh out loud, even while it mock-horrified me.

Somebody made a graphic showing examples of some of the pages in the book, and I thought I’d share that with you:

See? A little sad, a little harsh. A lot funny. Probably keep this away from tender-hearted kids who might think it’s a fun cartoon story, but I’d definitely picking it up and giving it a read, maybe using it as a conversation piece. It’s worth the read. 🙂

In other news, my keyboard doesn’t like the letter “J” all of a sudden. I have to hit the button in just the right spot for the letter to appear. It’s a hassle, let me tell you.