I liked the art and the main character a lot and felt like they were able to stand up for themselves in the end. Healy's depiction of toxic and manipulative relationships and how those relationships end is familiar and as we know relationships even mostly onesided ones often don't end in a way we find satisfying. Healy's pilgrimage through America is also a journey into his own mind, soundtracked by blistered footsteps and breathless huffs, and told with winning honesty. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

A frank depiction of being anxiously alive with deeply human threads and occasional 4th wall breaks. It’s an interesting exploration of meta artifice and narrative voice - where does the truth lie in a novel? A mordantly funny cautionary tale, and an incisive look at the boundaries of self-presentation and self-preservation. It's a metafiction muddle of fiction and autobiography, friendship and love, anxiety and paranoia, trust and deception.Giorgio is a jerk who makes bad decisions and seems to be full of half-cocked money-making schemes, but Frank sticks by him. A lot of the story made me feel uncomfortable, which isn't a bad thing in a story about a toxic relationship and dealing with mental health issues. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, but I did want a little more happening on a visual and emotionally expressive level.

Luke Healy's playful, hilarious third graphic novel uses crisp lines and physical comedy to portray an uneasy friendship between two young men on the cusp of adulting. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Frank (the standup comedian who is the book’s narrator) and Giorgio were friends as children, and on paper they’re very similar: both Irish in London, both gay and both single. The interplay between the characters reveals their personality issues and paints a portrait of a very dysfunctional relationship. Healy’s pilgrimage through America is also a journey into his own mind, soundtracked by blistered footsteps and breathless huffs, and told with winning honesty. Recommended for those who like package deliveries, drunken nights and friendly parents of childhood friends. It’s a nice, short read and I appreciate the layers Healey is trying to peel back and deconstruct but I don’t feel like I would be reading it over either as an autobiographical work or as a portrayal of mental health.

With enormous apprehension we have also categorised this story as a “romance” comic: not because there is any romantic love, but because the main characters interact in a relationship which is committed, unilaterally tender, and abusive. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. I enjoyed the way the author interspersed snippets from standup comedy routines and therapy sessions throughout the chapters. One of the funniest books you will ever read…’ -Irish Times ‘A quietly brilliant story of old friends and secret lives. It wants to be twisty, but its just a typical take on the stick in the mud being yanked out and waved about by a person with mysterious motives, dubious schemes, and/or mental health issues.There were many, many things to unpack, and while they were quite interesting, I don't feel we got the time or attention needed to get into them. It’s definitely an interesting exploration of fraught interpersonal relationships complicated by anxiety. It’s almost sinister, the way he insists that Frank washes his hair or cuts up his dinner – and there’s something else, too. Snippets from Frank’s middling stand-up routines are punctuated by the subtle farce of Healy’s mise-en-scène and the lively, at times scathingly pointed, banter of old friends. Along the way, he discovers Giorgio has been living a life not parallel to that he depicts on social media, and is committing fraud to pay bills.