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BOOK 170: UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER: UNA LAMARCHE

As a girl, Una LaMarche was as smart as she was awkward. She was blessed with a precocious intellect, a love of all things pop culture, and eyebrows bushier than Frida Kahlo’s. Adversity made her stronger...and funnier. In Unabrow, Una shares the cringe-inducing lessons she’s learned from a life as a late bloomer, including the seven deadly sins of DIY bangs, how not to make your own jorts, and how to handle pregnancy, plucking, and the rites of passage during which your own body is your worst frenemy.

Una LaMarche is the author of two young adult novels, FIVE SUMMERS and LIKE NO OTHER, and UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER, a collection of humor essays based on some of her more questionable life choices. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Observer and The Huffington Post, and blogs at The Sassy Curmudgeon. Una lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. You can follow her on Twitter @sassycurmudgeon.

REVIEW: I have to say I was a little disappointed by this book, not because it was terrible, because it was not, but because I had such high expectations of it.

I was expecting a truly humiliating journey through the childhood and teen years of an awkward female, who I believed to be much like myself. What I wasn’t expecting, and quite frankly got bored of, were the many details of childbirth and parenting.  Although Una (I feel like we’re on first name terms now, as I know so much about her, like the size of her stretched vagina and drop crotch pants) tells these stories with humour and wit, I found myself turning off and feeling somewhat conned. 

If you read the marketing material above you can see where I got the impression that this was a coming of age memoir, I think if it mentioned that after a couple of chapters she would be chatting about squeezing a person about of herself, I might not have been so excited about reading it.

I didn’t buy this book but was gifted it after I put it on my Amazon wish list, I wanted to read it because, as a late bloomer myself, I wanted to compare and laugh at someone else’s bad fashion choices, questionable crushes and dread of psychical education. All these things were in there but in my opinion, not enough to fill a book.

It does give me a little hope that one day I could compile my Christmas lists and diaries into a ‘memoir’ but I know that if a somewhat talented writer like Una LaMarche couldn’t make it work, then I couldn’t either. So in a way it killed my dreams, but I’ve never done anything with my life worth writing about and in a way I feel like Una’s embarrassing stories are not quite humiliating enough and are a bit too everyday to be as entertaining as they could have been.

I think a reviewer on Goodreads summed it up best when they said that the best thing about the book was the cover. Although this isn’t strictly true, it is a fantastic cover that promises so much more than the book delivered.