Book Review: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

I wanted to love Little Weirds. I’m ~ pro-weird ~ as a lifestyle, I root for Jenny Slate, and a book of surreal little essays about heartbreak and rebuilding yourself should have been my exact thing. Instead I spent most of it admiring sentences the way you admire fog: pretty, drifting, impossible to hold.

The premise, loosely (this book resists premises): a collection of dreamlike personal essays written in the aftermath of a divorce — part fairy tale, part food writing, part love letter to being alive. Slate narrates herself as a croissant, as weather, as a haunted house. Plot is not the point. The prose is the point.

What I Loved About Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

The last ten pages are the best in the book, and it’s not close. When Slate writes directly about loss, naming the grief instead of costuming it, the whole collection snaps into focus, and you can suddenly feel the book it wanted to be. Honest, raw, real. I’d read an entire book made of those ten pages.

And sentence to sentence, Slate can write. There are images in here I still think about years later, and a warmth that survives even the haziest stretches. The talent is never in question.

What I Didn’t Love About Little Weirds

The first two thirds float. So much of it is metaphor without context — dreams without consequence — and as lovely as the wandering prose sounds, I kept waiting for it to land somewhere specific and pay the reader back. Whimsy needs a tether. The concrete, painful details that ground the ending stay just out of frame for most of the book, which left the middle feeling more directionless than dreamy. With the grief material load-bearing from page one, I think this is a four- or five-star book.

Final Thoughts on Little Weirds

A 3 out of 5 that could have been more, and your mileage scales directly with your appetite for prose poems. If you read for language, add a star. If you read for story, borrow it from the library first. For memoirs that ground their strangeness in the specific, my five favorite memoirs has the ones I hand people — and if you’re trying to write your own raw material out of the fog, Old Friend from Far Away is the toolkit.

My final score: 3 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? ❌ Only if lyric essays are already your thing — in which case yes, and the ending is worth the fog.

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