On the HahaFiction shelf
Fight Night
Audiobook available · 6 hr 19 min
Swiv is out of school and sharing a cramped Toronto home with her pregnant mother and her grandmother, Elvira. Grandma takes over her education, and the family starts writing letters to make sense of their lives. Swiv addresses hers to the father who is no longer there.
From the publisher’s blurb
“a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women”Read the full description at Bloomsbury Publishing
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What makes it funny?
Grandma turns a two-thousand-piece jigsaw into a math lesson: at three pieces a day, how long does she need to stay alive to finish? Swiv has her own objections to adult logic, including a school exercise that allows the same time to dismantle something as to rebuild it. Readers in book groups particularly enjoy Grandma’s sayings.
The comedy at work
Swiv reports the adults with blunt precision, even when she does not fully understand them. Elvira answers frightening subjects with jokes and exuberant lessons. Their arguments about everyday things give the family ways to speak about aging and absence without becoming solemn at every turn.
Try this if…
The letters and conversations suit readers who enjoy following a family through a child’s observations. Readers describe finding the book beautiful as well as funny and single out Elvira’s sayings for laughter.
Good to know
The family’s history includes suicide, mental illness, grief and abuse. The jokes sit close to those experiences throughout the story.
More funny diary & letters
Sources & further reading
- Apple Books audiobook
Book information
- Bloomsbury ebook
Publisher
- Publisher
Publisher
- Publishers Weekly review
Review
- Reader discussion
Reader discussion
- Reading excerpt
Reading sample
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