MARCH 2011 - AudioFile
It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
Maria Russo
[Crosley] mostly succeeds in How Did You Get This Number, her second collection of essays about making it, zanily, in the big city. Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike, occasionally trite, but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance.
—The New York Times
From the Publisher
"Wonderful and entertaining." — USA Today
"Undeniably funny... Crosley's work speaks volumes to her generation." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Charming... Crosley has an original spark... [She] is like a tap dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike... capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance." — The New York Times Book Review
"Crosley writes with such buoyancy. But [she]... shows a depth that's every bit as enjoyable as the full-on belly laughs." — Entertainment Weekly
MARCH 2011 - AudioFile
It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A worthy successor to Crosley's well-received debut, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008). Where her first collection focused on a young professional's life in Manhattan, this follow-up finds the author-whose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentioned-taking her show on the road. She gets lost in Lisbon (actually, she gets lost pretty much everywhere), threatened by a bear in Alaska and all but deported from France-or at least discouraged from ever again visiting Notre Dame. Most of the book is funny, some of it even laugh-out-loud, but her literary gifts go well beyond easy laughs. The humor flows naturally and subtly from characters and situations, as if these were real-life short stories. "An Abbreviated Catalog of Tongues," which initially seems to be a perfunctory pet essay, yet turns revelatory in a number of directions, addressing everything from sibling relationships to her parents' religion. "[M]y parents are not big believers in God," she writes. "Or, rather, they believe in him partially. Which is tricky. It's like being kind of pregnant or only mostly dead. You're either in or you're out." Perhaps the finest essay is the final one, "Off the Back of a Truck," a clever, challenging piece from which the book takes its title. Initially about wanting what you can't afford, it transforms into an exploration of receiving what you want that you can't afford, through means that you're only partially willing to admit are pretty shady. Ultimately, though, it becomes a meditation on a romance that forces Crosley to come to terms with a truth she'd suspected and the lie she was living. It's the least humorous of the collection, but the most unflinchingly true. Confirmation of the promise shown in the author's bestselling debut.
