User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
It's been a while since I've read a graphic novel, or a collection of humorous essays. In fact, I think this is the first time I've ever read a collection of humorous essays that is also a graphic novel! Brosh is so good at mixing the absurd, funny, poignant and heartbreaking moments of life into a page-turning joy-ride. The illustrations are perfect. The stories are relatable and ridiculously true-to-life. The friend duct-taped to a chair in the family driveway? No, I can't explain it. You'll just have to read it. The undercurrent of Brosh's personal struggles with grief and depression are beautifully rendered. In this difficult year, Solutions and Other Problems was exactly the read I needed. It got me out of my own space. It made me laugh aloud. It was absolutely delightful. Needless to say, I immediately bought Brosh's previous book as soon as I finished this one!
Rating: really liked it
REREAD TO GET ALL THE NON-ARC CONTENT INTO ME.
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best humor 2020! what will happen?backtracking to add this to my book riot challenge:
fulfilling book riot's 2020 read harder challenge task: #4 Read a graphic memoirNOW AVAILABLE!!!! FINALLLLYYYYY!!!
Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.no spoilers, but since everyone wants to know—was this book worth waiting more than five years for?
YES. DON’T BE A DUMMY, OF COURSE IT WAS!!
it is bigger, funnier, sadder and—for those of you hoping—it does have more dumb dogs:
and one diabolically clever dog. and a cat.
i’m not going to post too many pictures, because you all deserve your own individual voyages of discovery, but FYI: the pictures i AM posting are from my ARC, which is in black-and-white—the finished book will be in full color.
i honestly don’t know how i was lucky enough to score an ARC of this, but it was exactly what i needed to get me thru another day of this dumpster fire of a year. and, in a gift that keeps giving—there are some pages in the ARC where the words are missing or smeared in a “content TK” sort of way, which means that, come september, there will still be new material for me.
because i already want more.
although allie brosh is infinitely more talented than i will ever be—what she’s able to convey with just
posture in her cartoons is exquisite—there’s so much of that RELATABLE CONTENT the kids are always talking about. in fact, there were times i actually felt like she was speaking directly…to
me 
but even when she wasn’t breaking that fourth wall, i felt both a kinship with her and an urge to comfort her and tell her how seen and heard and appreciated she is.
i mean, i’m not a big enough liar to tell her that “everything’s gonna be all right” (or, even, as she promises her sardine-friend:
it will be better very soon), but it is a fact that what she creates and puts out into the world is helping people she'll never even meet, and i hope that there are artists or writers out there that inspire or comfort her in the same way.
because, as she says,
no one should have to feel like a pointless little weirdo alone.
and she’s here for all of us, in her/our grief and loneliness, anxiety and self-scrutiny, in how we approach all of life’s difficulties, great and small.
i know it’s a stupid thing to say, and it usually makes me cringe when other people say it about confessional-creators, but i’m saying it anyway—this is a brave book. it’s hard to make yourself vulnerable, and i love her for doing it.
even in the book's darkest moments, there's a filament of humor running through it, which to me suggests a remarkable capacity for resilience, and i hope she never loses sight of that.
so much of this book made me laugh with joy—the dandelion story, the car stereo story, the story about the dog and the carrots, the resolution to the poop mystery, dear god, every word of the story about her childhood neighbor, richard—witnessing the very BIRTH of social awkwardness.
and this
i love these things. i love them in a way that defies all logic or proportion.
HELLO! I AM A BALLOON DO YOU WANT TO BUY A CAR? had me laughing so hard my stomach hurt, leaving me completely unprepared for the emotional evisceration of the fish video:
I LOVE YOU!destroyed.
it is an emotional roller coaster, full of googly eyes, goofy syntax, and hard-earned wisdom:
If you can’t win, start playing a different game and score just as many points.even especially if it's just about humiliating some noisy-ass bird.
the wait is not long now!
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oh, honey.
review to come.
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pay no mind to my hi-gloss sheen. that's just what happens from wearing a mask for nine hours in nyfc summerheat awfulness. and am also possibly sweaty with
joy? anyway, off to drink a cocktail and read this book!
***********************************
you guys.
you guys.
confirmation that this exists and a copy is heading my way.
***********************************
i'm pretty sure it's ILLEGAL to push the pub date back ANOTHER SIX MONTHS!!!
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
Hysterical. Sad. Poignant. Worth the wait.
Rating: really liked it
When considering what to write in this review, I had a lot of thoughts floating around in my head akin to, “a book doesn’t HAVE to funny to be good, you just made a pre-assumption the author is funny,” “it’s not up to you to decide how someone gets to describe their experiences,” etc. Which are both true. But they also obscured the fact that, at the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy
Solutions and Other Problems very much.
I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to. Like every other person and their mother on this page right now, I loved the
Hyperbole and a Half blog. I still google “allie brosh pain scale” anytime I want to rip out my sides laughing. I enjoyed her first book (didn’t love, but enjoyed). I wondered where she had gone and was thus delighted to see when this emerged from pre-order. In short, I had a lot of stake in the game.
But, although I tried, reading this book just wasn’t fun. First, it isn’t funny. Senses of humor are of course somewhat subjective and I know other reviewers already hard-core disagree with me, but in over 500 pages I chuckled maybe 4 or 5 times and, of the 25 stories, would classify only one (“Cat”) as funny; even then, not to the level of her previous work. Which, on its own, is completely fine. This style of book doesn’t have to be funny. Just because I historically place Allie Brosh’s writing in the “comedy’ bucket doesn’t mean she has to continue that way. Her work can evolve and her style translated to much more series topics.
Except reading these comics didn’t feel like someone who was intentionally using her style to share said serious topics. It felt like someone who was still very much in the middle of being incredible sad and lonely and possibly self-destructive vomited her misery out into this public format in a “HA HA LOOK AT ME ISN’T MY PATHETICNESS FUNNY?” kind of way that left me as a reader deeply cringing. I’m drawn back to her famous comic, Adventures in Depresison, where she first shared her struggle with depression. The comic ends leaving the reader thinking she’s ok – but after two years of utter silence, we got part 2, which revealed she had been about to hit rock bottom and hadn’t known it. To me, this book feels like that: like the writer is portraying what are supposed to be funny clever stories, but they’re covering up something much sadder.
I want to clarify that I am absolutely 100% not passing judgment or making assumptions about Allie Brosh or her mental health. Rather, I am describing the sentiment I – the reader – was left with. (Writing this has also made me realize I do think she was trying to be funny; it just didn’t land.)
Structurally, this book didn’t work very well either. Allie has previously commented on her blog FAQ how much time she spends considering story structure, and that she’ll often pull a comic if the underlying skeleton isn’t sufficient. That self-editing didn’t happen here. I particularly recall the story where she talked about a fight she had with her ex-husband, Duncan, that climaxes in a squabble about bananas. I
think the story was supposed to be talking about how ridiculous arguments are at the end of the relationship, but the comic itself so completely failed to have a beginning, middle, and end that it instead it just came off as a random series of interactions that (once again) left me cringing and uncomfortable (and not in a reflective way). Quite a few of the comics had that wandering randomness: ok…here are some thoughts and things that happened…moving on to the next one. I found myself skimming the pictures to skip to the text because, in the majority of cases, the pictures didn’t add much to the storytelling. They were just there. The nuance of observation that has previously marked Allie’s work has slipped into the humor of randomness: “ha ha isn’t this arbitrary ha ha.”
Finally (and this is going to sound odd considering how much I’ve been complaining about her book being all dark and unfunny) but at times the book would have benefited from going more into the sad shit happening in her life. She would insert it into comics like she wanted to talk about it, but then it would never come up again. It was that socially awkward moment where someone is just waiting to be asked about Topic X, but no one asks them so instead they keep dropping cryptic hints.
I would not have finished this book if it hadn’t been written by Allie Brosh. If the manuscript had been submitted to a publisher by a complete unknown, I think a good editor would have said, “This is a brilliant idea. Take another year to emotionally process all this content, and then come back and try again.” It breaks my heart, but after reading this I really just hope that Allie has found real-life support and community, that terrible awful things stop happening to her, and also that I don’t ever need to re-read Solutions and Other Problems.
(Three stars because I can’t emotionally put it in the same category as my 2-star books – if nothing else, it’s a huge amount of work and creativity.)
Rating: really liked it
I'm leaving this unrated (for now) because I feel conflicted. As you may or may not know, I leave books unrated when I feel that no rating properly reflects my feelings.
This book started out amazingly. I was so, so excited to read more of Allie Brosh's work as Hyperbole and a Half is one of my all time favorite books and I have reread it so many times. My body was literally quivering with excitement and joy.
The first couple stories were hilarious as in made me literally laugh out loud hilarious but then I hit a bump. There was a section were Allie talks about the rough experiences she had that delayed this book for so long.
Don't get me wrong. I think that her stories are inspirational and should be shared but, for some reason, at that time, reading her heartbreaking experiences... just broke me. It started out with my tearing up and I was like "yeah, this is normal. it's a sad story."
But then my brain was like
GUESS WHAT ITS TIME FOR AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. Don't worry. I'm fine now but there must have been some subconscious tension or anxiety or something that was just waiting for a catalyst to explode.
Anywho, my very dramatic point is that, after that point, I kind of just numbly stumbled through the rest of the book so I didn't enjoy it. That's not the book's fault. It's my brain's fault.
At some point, I'll reread this and hopefully enjoy it more.
Overall, I highly recommend this book and her first book!
Happy reading!
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Rating: really liked it
I really don't understand why people are getting upset about the publish date. I consider her first book one that changed my life. It made me laugh, cry and gave me a better understanding of myself dealing with depression and anxiety. I am just so thankful that she has another one in the works and would happily wait years to experience another one of her pieces. Be patient my friends. I have no doubt that it will be worth the wait.
Rating: really liked it
An artist's nihilistic musings on her life, told in deceptively simple graphic essays. I have seen this book shelved in both Humor and Memoir; I think her first book sits solidly in the former category and this one, published years later and with a decidedly grimmer outlook, belongs more securely in the latter.
Rating: really liked it
How am I just hearing about this?
Not until next year...
Rating: really liked it
Allie Brosh’s graphic-memoir, Solutions and Other Problems, managed to make this reader chuckle, do a couple of double-takes and even stop reading, just to feel. Fabulous fake excuses like “Oh, no. 9-1-1 is calling. I should go,” are quite complementary to her ‘a-ha’ moments such as: while babysitting, “It is me. I am the somebody. I should do something.”
I’m not sure if there’s a little Allie in me, or if she is just some kind of word wizard to take my thoughts and articulate them so clearly. “And when you’re in full-on rage-ejection mode, there is nothing more infuriating than a reasonable point.” Her ability to adopt only pets with the quirkiest personalities result in charming stories, relayed in the most entertaining way.
Child-Allie had to have been a handful. Summing up the story of Rudolph: Santa realizes the outcast reindeer is “the only portable light source in the entire North Pole”. Her unrelenting need to fit into a bucket and her bitter disappointment with The Ugly Duckling (it was an insufficient answer to her questions) make me want sit down with Ms. Brosh and politely beg, “tell me more”.
I will admit, there were a couple of chapters that I didn’t exactly connect with. I’m fairly certain that is due to my advanced age and absence of cool-points, rather than any issues with Ms. Brosh’s work. So, while I can say I liked it a lot, I think “my” students are going to love it.
I won a hard-cover copy from a Goodreads Giveaway, so shout out to Goodreads for helping me grow my favorite classroom library!
Rating: really liked it
Hm. I’ll try to find something more to say. Other than life is hard.
*
I thought about it overnight. I struggle so much. Every day, every hour, sometimes every minute is a new paradigm. My impressions of life, my feelings, my senses, my mood, energy, everything shifts on a dime sometimes. Often. I was hoping Allie would make me laugh the way she did with her first book. Can't say I was
expecting it, exactly, because I know better, on a conscious level, than to let expectations lead me. But yes, I was hoping to laugh a lot more about how painful living with mental illness can be.
As many of us know, Allie Brosh's life brought several tragedies for her to deal with while she was working on this book. Losing her sister to suicide, the breakup of her marriage, cancer. Any one of which is life-changing and traumatic. Frankly, I'm amazed she pulled it off at all. Frankly, I'm amazed when I manage to get out of bed. Talent is no protection and no guarantee of productivity, heaven knows. I struggle daily with the reality that I must concentrate on just BEING and resist any temptation to define myself by achievements, even less so by my productivity, because most days I'm happy if I manage to eat a decent meal and remember to take my meds (yes, despite the reminder on my phone), manage to find gratitude for what I have. And whatever talents I'm supposed to be sharing with the world... just have to be.
This is not just another book. This is a heroic effort. And so, I'm being completely subjective and rating this book on that measure alone. I doubt Allie & I have much in common, other than struggling with mental illness, but there is recognition there. There is survival and struggle and finding humour in things that really aren't at all funny while you're living them. And frankly, I have so very little hope left for anything at all, that Allie is giving me hope that... the struggle itself is somehow worthwhile. Somehow. You can read other reviews for a more objective take. This isn't it.
*
Here is a comment I wrote before the book was released, when it seemed it might never be published (which earned 64 likes, in case anyone is curious about what people were reacting to).
A Plea for CompassionWhen I saw this "new" title by Allie Brosh, I didn't know anything about it and just thought "gotta get my hands on that title!" and left it at that. Then I thought I'd borrow it from the library and obviously hit a wall. Then I saw Amazon's publication date was 2050 and I started investigating a little. Now, having read the following update provided by a kind GR member https://gazettereview.com/2015/07/wha..., it's looking like this book may never get published. Then again, there's a small chance it might be... some day in this century. Maybe. But probably not. Or the stars may align the right way for Allie and it will after all. Or not. And if not, that's really okay.
Sometimes I find sharing my own experience is helpful to illustrate a point: I struggle with bipolar and anxiety disorders and what is looking like undiagnosed complex PTSD, which are mostly expressed with near-constant depression and ever-increasing anxiety attacks despite being medicated. Also, chronic pain to top it all off, and I get it, I really get it; that feeling like there's no point to anything and even if you've got talent and have "done things" before, not being up to using it and wanting to do other things to get better. Even if by "other things" you mostly just focus on keeping on breathing and eating and sleeping and NOT killing yourself on those days when you badly want to make the suffering just stop.
You want to do things, you set out to do things, and then... there's just no point to doing those things because they just end up making you feel bad, because self-criticism and
nopointoanything-ism. And on top of it all, if you're a perfectionist, if you
are going to do a thing, it's gotta be AMAZING, or at least more than just okay, so there's doubly no point to doing a thing, because you're in no place to be producing anything good when you're feeling empty & worthless to begin with.
And it really doesn't make any difference how many people are telling you how good and full of talent you are. In fact the more people tell you how good you are, the more that awful thing in your head grows and and grows and convinces you they're all LYING and really, you're a sack of shit and an impostor and totally WORTHLESS, besides which there’s just no point because they’ll always expect more more more and it’s never enough.
Anyway, this isn't about me (or well, yeah it is, obviously), but I’m talking about the nature of depression and the fact that Allie was incredibly courageous when she reached out to the whole world with such open candor about a painful reality she lives with every day, and did amazing work with
Hyperbole and a Half, which touched countless lives via the book itself, and all the times her relatable illustration made the rounds on the net, and made people feel less alone and less freakish, or whatever.
Considering all that, knowing she had the intention of putting out a second book but with repeated changes to the publication date, was obviously struggling in some way that should be obvious to anyone who’d been even a little familiar with the first book—even without having read the update for which I provided the link above—it's unfair to place expectations or any sort or pressure on her anymore, and it saddens me to see all those, admittedly old reviews—with people complaining about having to wait. Some are generous and express sympathy. Too many callously think they’re buying just any product and expect speedy delivery, not thinking for a moment what the message these books is about. And that what made “Hyperbole” so damn funny and poignant was that the author could only write about it like that because of living with a form of intractable mental illness that resists treatment, which is a reality for about a third of us genetically predisposed severely mentally ill creatures.
All this to say that to put expectations such as deadlines and promotions for holiday gifting and public eagerness for more more more... those expectation alone are hell to live with for someone constantly shadowed by the black dog of depression and anxiety, which are reasons enough on their own not to deliver as expected. All the more so when life throws extra wrenches at someone already struggling to hold things together.
All I can say, what we should ALL say, is “Be well Allie, thank you for sharing what you did, that was plenty enough and then some. And if you ever feel up to sharing more, then great. And if you don't feel up to sharing anything else, then great also because what you did share was tremendous and means a lot to me and I always enjoy seeing your panels again. Here's hoping you have more good days than bad ones. Sending lotsa love, and thanks for the laughs and the tears of recognition. ❤️”
Rating: really liked it
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HYPERBOLE AND A HALF is probably one of my favorite memoirs of all time. The simple drawing style and complex ideas really hooked me and I loved how she balanced talking about her struggles with depression with the funnier, more light-hearted stories, like the tales about her dogs (Simple Dog and Helper Dog). When I found out Brosh was writing a follow-up called SOLUTIONS AND OTHER PROBLEMS, I was terribly excited.
But then the author kind of just seemed to disappear from the internet and the book's publication date came and went with no book, and I wondered what was going on. Was the author okay? Did something happen? Even though it's none of my business, and I totally respect that, after reading an intimate book like HYPERBOLE that really, really resonated with me on such a profound level, I felt like the author and I had gone on a journey of sorts together and I felt really invested on where she had gone after our shared leg.
SOLUTIONS AND OTHER PROBLEMS talks about why Brosh disappeared from the public eye. And-- it's really, really devastating. I wasn't really prepared for it, even though one of my friends was kind enough to warn me. Because the book starts out with the usual funny anecdotes where you're like "ha ha, this is so weird and quirky and funny," and then it jumps right into the dark stuff. Some of my friends didn't like this book because of that, but I honestly really liked it. Well-- maybe liked is the wrong word. I
appreciated it. HYPERBOLE was like that too. Brutally honest juxtaposed against some light-hearted funny moments that made the darker content feel more transitory. SOLUTIONS is like that, too, just on a much larger scale.
Personally, I loved SOLUTIONS AND OTHER PROBLEMS. Some of the stories made me laugh out loud, one of them made me cry (not with laughter), and all of them made me appreciate Brosh. Her drawing style and self-effacing humor are both so well done. I was glad that she decided to share a glimpse into the window of her life, even though it's less than perfect. There is so much in here about hurting and healing, and learning to accept yourself and the quirkiness of life. It's just such a good book with such a great message. I would recommend this to anyone who feels alone and in the dark.
5 stars
Rating: really liked it
So apparently in the last three years:
--Her sister committed suicide.
--Her marriage ended (she now lives in Denver, he now lives in Seattle).
--She had a cancer scare.
--She required major surgery.
--She has redirected her efforts into public speaking and abandoned her blog.
--This book has been canceled by the publisher.
So...DANG.
UPDATE: It's been three more years, and since then she has...disappeared. No new posts. No new book (it was canceled, finally) and no-one has heard anything from her. We can only hope she's just moved on to something she cares about.
UPDATE 2: Supposedly this is coming out (with a completely different cover) in September of 2020. I've pre-ordered it yet again. But I remain skeptical.
Rating: really liked it
I really hate to say this (and I see I'm going to be in the overwhelming minority here) but I didn't care for this book nearly as much as the first one. I got halfway through before realizing most of the stories felt "meh". Made it 3/4ths of the way through before putting it down yesterday. And I honestly had no interest in finishing it but did for the sake of review.
Every. Single. Story in the first book is either hilarious or sad & hilarious. Most of the stories in this one are "okay" and forgettable. The funniest thing to me was Duncan's face in the banana story. I've reread the originals (and her blog exclusives) many times. I don't think I'll reread this one at all. She also seems to be using more "lol it's funny because it's random" type humor.
I'm honestly sorry to be saying this because I loved her blog and first book but this just doesn't do it for me. Still glad I pre-ordered because her prior work has given me countless laughs and poignant moments.
Rating: really liked it
I loved Allie's blog and first book, but sadly, this was a letdown. I mean, I'm still giving it 3 stars - it wasn't
bad and if you enjoy Allie's work in general, it's definitely worth giving a try - but I found this a bit lackluster. The funny stories and jokes didn't deliver as well for me as they have in the past, and something about the entire collection just kind of felt to me like maybe Allie Brosh didn't really want to write this, but felt like she was supposed to, or something? I could totally be projecting here, and I try to never assume an author's intentions, but that is the general feeling that stuck with me through a lot of
Solutions and Other Problems: that maybe her heart wasn't in it this time.
All of that said, it broke my heart to learn some of the tragedies that have struck Allie Brosh and her family since we last heard from her. If she writes another book, I'm sure I'll still read it, too, and I'm forever grateful for the incredible impact
Hyperbole and a Half had on me as a mentally ill teen who felt so alone until finding Allie's words.
This is one of the most conflicted 3-star ratings I've ever given, because I waited so many years, holding my breath, convinced that if Allie ever wrote another book, it would be everything I wanted and more... and it simply wasn't. But that's okay. I think this book is going to be the perfect fit for a lot of readers, and if I'm not one of those, I'm still glad I got the chance to read this, and I'm glad Allie decided to create something new.
✨
Content warnings for: (view spoiler)
[mental illness, medical scares, cancer scares, medical procedures, death of a sibling, grief/loss, loss of pets (hide spoiler)]———
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Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars
Who has not seen the comics/stories by Allie Brosh? Case in point:
I was a follower of her blog, which is also the title of her first book (Hyperbole and a Half) and loved her work. But then she practically disappeared right when her book became a best seller. It was strange and worrying. This second book explains a lot about why she seemingly fell off the face of the earth for years, and well, it's not a humorous story unfortunately for her. And it's also a little unfortunate for the reader if they were hoping this second book would only be full of laughs.
But mixed in with the terrible truth of how she dealt with the past several years, are still some of Brosh's trademark hilarious vignettes of her life. In particular I laughed until I cried while reading 'Richard' and 'Bananas'.
So go into this still prepared to laugh, but also to maybe be a little depressed because life is depressing at times. And when it is, sometimes all you can do is just keep going and laugh when you can.
