Book Review: “Someday, Someday, Maybe”
Gilma Velasquez ’14 / Emertainment Monthly Staff
Author: Lauren Graham
Release Date: April 30, 2013
Genre: Fiction
The book Someday, Someday, Maybe is the story of Franny Banks. Franny is a aspiring actress in New York City in 1995. She has set a deadline of three years for herself. Franny believes that three years is enough time to tell her whether she is cut out to be an actress or not. The only problem is that it is January and she only has six more months for her deadline to be reached, meaning she has a lot of work to do since she has not had a lot of work as an actress.
The plot of this story develops slowly. The story benefits from a slow plot line, though, because the inner problems that Franny feels are more explored. They are also seen more easily. Franny is constantly battling whether she should continue trying or should she quit. In other books, this can become annoying since the characters get whiny, and all I have thought is ‘make up your mind already.’ However, in this book it doesn’t feel that way since there is a lot of humor throughout the entire book. The way in which the humor is shown is Franny is always messing up in one way or another and during those mistakes everyone is telling her how funny she is. She agrees, yet in her mind does not understand why people find what she is doing funny. The story also has many details that make it realistic.
I also think that Graham did a good job in capturing the time frame of the novel, but also the imperfections of people. Time is captured well because of the references of films and technology that are made such as beepers, landlines, and machines that used cassettes. As I mentioned before, Franny is a character that is always messing up. Also, throughout the book her imperfections are prominent which is nice since all people are flawed making the character of Franny authentic.
I personally enjoyed reading this book. I felt that this story, although centered on Franny being an actress, is more about growing and learning as an adult. People think coming of age stories are only from adolescence to adulthood, but that’s not entirely true. We are always growing and learning, and this book those a nice job of capturing that growth of adulthood and life experiences. My only complaint about this book is, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of film references that I wasn’t always familiar with. And, because I wasn’t familiar with the film references, I did not quite understand what was happening. Other than that I think that this book is a great summer read and I urge you to give it a try.