What I’m Reading -- Its Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

Ned Vizzini’s latest novel is quite reminiscent of another ’06 Teen novel which is Jordan Sonnenblick’s Notes from the Midnight Driver. In Its Kind of a Funny Story, Craig is having trouble dealing with his life that seems to center around his failure to land the girl he wants and failure to handle his new tough school. This gets to him enough that he considers jumping off a New York City brigde, but luckily he gets checked in to a mental hospital. At the hospital, he starts to recover and tries to get things straight in his life again. Of course, he is put in an adult ward with lots of charmingly weird mental patients. This skews any reality that Vizzini builds up during the first part of the book. The author wonderfully sets up Craig’s life and why it becomes too much for him. After he ends up in the mental hospital, the novel is still entertaining, just in a completely different way. Overall, this is a solid novel with aspirations of begin something more. This is as entertaining as his last novel, Be More Chill, so I hope Vizzini is building up to a book that better combines the elements of his novels with a bit more depth.