Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for giving me a free eARC of this book to read in exchange for my review!

I stepped out of my comfort zone in choosing this and am so glad I did. It is quirky, witty, fast paced and great fun. A bit of romance, a bit of comedy, a bit of mystery and lots of thrills make for a very enjoyable read.

This is my third read by Adler, a strikingly prolific author who recently passed away. Some of his books were adapted for screen, but all of his books seem to be written for it, which is to say there’s a certain rhythm, certain pace, certain style to all of the ones I’ve read thus far that make them very dynamic in a very specifically very screen-ready fashion. And then there’s the melodrama, can’t forget the melodrama - Adler’s books version of drama. It’s heightened, exaggerated, overblown…not outrageously so, but noticeably. Mind you, it doesn’t affect the reading, in fact it makes for a fairly entertaining read, but there’s something too in-your-face about it.
This one, like many Adler’s books, concentrates on the Jewish American experience, taking the readers back in time to the post-Prohibition pre-WWII era. The year is 1937 and gangsters rule. In this book, these gangsters are predominantly Jewish. The story takes place in New York, state and city, and nearly every single person speaks in phonetics, sounding not only like a typical nyuuu oawka (that’s New Yorker for the uninitiated) but also peppering the speech liberally with Yiddish, not the most attractive of languages – proof…of the two protagonists, a perfectly nice sounding name like Miriam has been mutilated into Mutzie.
Mutzie is a about to turn eighteen and her life is laid out before her, by her mother, a life strikingly resembling that of her mother’s, small, insular existence revolving around their apartment and their family. Mutzie has grown up on movies and wants more, she wants a movie life. So, she gets a movie-style makeover and with her new look wins over the attention of a local gangster, a murderer for pay, no less (who said young people make good decisions), a superficially attractive but ugly on the inside sort of man. And so, she becomes his numba one goil with all the concomitant nastiness. And for the summer he puts her up at a prestigious upstate resort for him and people like him.
And in that resort a young man with a million jokes and puns has recently been hired for the position of tumler (a social director), he sees Mutzie and goes all googaa for her…cue in the forbidden romance. Slowly but surely as their storylines converge, so do their paths, and soon it’s up to the jokes-a-minute Romeo to rescue his gangster-used Juliet from the life she had so naively chosen for herself.
And he’ll try his best too, all the while never pausing with the jokes.
So, a decent story, a decent book, Adler’s books have a certain innate readability to them, but it does get tiresome at times, the vernacular, the bizarre lingering on rape and violence, and oh, yes, the vernacular. But then again, it reads quickly and does a fairly credible job of revisiting a bygone era if only in a manic Marvelous Mrs. Maisel sort of way. Some of the jokes are actually pretty amusing too. Thanks Netgalley.

The East Coast adventures and misadventures of two determined dreamers at the end of the tumultuous 30s in a very entertaining and action-packed romp blessed with a cast of very colorful and unforgettable characters and dazzling verbal pyrotechnics.

Warren Adler was a wonderful American wordsmith and "Funny Boys" might actually be one of his most delightful accomplishments.

A marvellous fictional treat that deserves to be trully enjoyed without any moderation whatsoever 👍👍

Many thanks to Netgalley and Stonehouse for this terrific ARC

Two very different people coming together with two very different ambitions in life? Then of course you’d get romance! I really enjoyed this it was pretty fun and interesting and I had a lot of fun going through it of course! 5 out of 5 stars!