Nicole Reads A Lot

I was intrigued when I read the description of this book, and excited when Bloomsbury USA allowed me access to it via Netgalley, but I’m sad to say that Mimi never lived up to my hopes. I can’t say expectations, because I’d never before read anything by Ms. Ellmann, so I didn’t know what I’d get in this book. I thought this was an interesting little story about two strange people, but to call this the feminist novel of the century so far? I think not.

It took me a while to get into the book, because Harrison Hanafan was too manic a character for me to get a handle on initially. I had trouble reconciling this person who bounced from subject to subject and thought to thought with little apparent purpose with the steadiness of mind and hand required to be a top plastic surgeon in New York City. Mimi, too, was so unbearably precious that she never seemed like a realistic character to me. The conversation during their meet cute grated on me and felt fake. Likewise, everything about Gertrude, including her name, struck me as to awful to be believed. If such a woman was real, I find it hard to believe that anybody would put up with her for as long as Harrison did.

I feel that it took Mimi about 20 or 30 pages to settle into what I’d consider a readable rhythm. I’ve given up on books sooner than this, but I wanted to stick it out, and I’m glad I did. Over the course of the book, Mimi and Harrison came to feel less like caricatures and more like representations of actual, functioning people. I don’t think that Mimi was a bad book; in fact, at some points it was laugh-out-loud funny. I just found it ever so twee. I’m fairly certain that if an infinite number of hipster monkeys from Brooklyn sat typing on their restored vintage typewriters for an infinite amount of time, one of them would eventually produce Mimi.