Just One Reader's Opinion!

Scrappy Little Nobody

Scrappy Little NobodyScrappy Little Nobody By Anna Kendrick

Source Purchased

Published by Touchstone on November 15, 2016

Rating: three-half-stars

Cover image and summary from Goodreads:

A collection of humorous autobiographical essays by the Academy Award-nominated actress and star of Up in the Air and Pitch Perfect.

Even before she made a name for herself on the silver screen starring in films like Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air, Twilight, and Into the Woods, Anna Kendrick was unusually small, weird, and β€œ10 percent defiant.”

At the ripe age of thirteen, she had already resolved to β€œkeep the crazy inside my head where it belonged. Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In Scrappy Little Nobody, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations.

With her razor-sharp wit, Anna recounts the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture as only she canβ€”from her unusual path to the performing arts (Vanilla Ice and baggy neon pants may have played a role) to her double life as a middle-school student who also starred on Broadway to her initial β€œdating experiments” (including only liking boys who didn’t like her back) to reviewing a binder full of butt doubles to her struggle to live like an adult woman instead of a perpetual β€œman-child.”

Enter Anna’s world and follow her rise from β€œscrappy little nobody” to somebody who dazzles on the stage, the screen, and now the pageβ€”with an electric, singular voice, at once familiar and surprising, sharp and sweet, funny and serious (well, not that serious).

This was a really fun book. Anna Kendrick is funny, smart, and sassy. That she describes herself as anxious and weird only makes me like her more!

I liked that she talked a lot about her background and her life before becoming a famous actor, and of course I loved when she included any stories or anecdotes about other famous people, but at times I found myself wanting more from the book.

I enjoyed the book and read it fairly quickly, and definitely laughed out loud more than once, but I guess it was a bit of an uneven read for me. There are aspects of her life that she wrote about in depth, and I definitely enjoyed her honesty about her relationships and her anxiety, but there were other parts of the book where it felt like she could have written more or gone deeper, like the making of the film Up In the Air, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

I’ve heard that the audio book, which she narrates herself, is excellent to listen to, and I’m interested in checking out that version sometime.

Anna Kendrick is someone I already liked, but she comes across as so normal and relateable in this book (and funny!) that I came away liking her even more. Recommended!

three-half-stars

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