I laughed out loud reading this book. It is about 4 people who meet on the night they are each going to commit suicide. I know it doesnt sound funny but it was honest and funny and a great read. It does have a lot of bad language in it but they are in England and somehow the F word doesnt sound as bad if you imagine it with an english accent. Go figure. ( )

The lives of people who meet on a rooftop and decide to each wait a year before they will return to jump off. What a concept, what a story. ( )

I started this hoping for some light reading. I quite enjoyed the author's 'About a Boy' although there was more bad language than I was comfortable with.

But the book opens with four unlikeable people, all thinking about ending their lives, in a cold-blooded way. This is not my idea of a setting for comedy. I looked at a few reviews, and saw that readers are divided between finding this hilarious, or rather sordid. I suspect my opinion would be with the latter group, so decided to abandon it. ( )

If I was rating this book on how much I enjoyed it alone, it would be 1 star. But I gave Hornby partial credit for a modicum of originality and wit. Mostly for the wit.
Maureen, Martin, JJ, and Jess meet at the top of a tower, each with the intent to jump off it and end their own life. The book is narrated from all four perspectives and follows the four as they each make a different choice.

I guess this book would be classified as black humor, but frankly while it was dark, the characters were so unsympathetic by and large that you really didn't care. And while there were some witty moments, there weren't enough to save the book. Not even close.
My first criticism is that I seriously felt at the end of the book that two of the four characters really should have jumped. That's how unlikable and unsympathetic they were. One of them, Jess, was also grating and annoying.

In addition, all four voices were extremely similar. If you are going to write in the first person from four perspectives, the voices can't all sound like the authors voice.
Finally, it was just a boring book. To be at all worthwhile or engaging, you really would have to care about the characters on some level, but there's almost no opportunity. Maureen is the most sympathetic, but I never really felt her pain. I never felt any of their pain. They were all presumably conflicted, but they all just came across as incredibly self involved.

After 100 pages, I really didn't want to finish this one, but I forced myself. And it didn't improve one bit. In fact, there was one scene, an "intervention" of sorts, and that was really when the book should have been just tossed to the side. Just totally not my thing. ( )

I had looked forward to reading this because I thought it was going to be a funny book. (I know suicide isn't funny) but the premise of this sounded like a fun read. It wasn't fun, but it was thought-provoking. A couple of characters were totally annoying, but even they give us something to think about. ( )