3:5 ⭐️ rounded up.

The whole ‘hot mess of a woman’ may seem like a tired trope to some, but for me, I bloody love it. And this one falls squarely into this category, and I revelled in it!

From the first page, I was completely hooked. The characters, just brilliant! Complex, flawed, and utterly human, they leapt off the page. Poutney's writing is nothing short of gorgeous, each word carefully chosen to paint a vivid portrait of urban life and its myriad intricacies.

Affairs, honestly not usually my cuppa at all, but this one somehow hit different. Gabe, with his alluring messiness, stood in stark contrast to Kate's composed demeanor and Matt's unwavering stability. The dynamic between these characters was electrifying, their interactions crackling with tension and longing.

Some might argue that not much happens within the confines of this narrative, I do and don’t agree. Some parts I found a little lagging and then others I was completely enthralled. In awe of the silences and subtle hints at things happening.

A richly intoxicating prose and richly drawn characters. I will absolutely be reading more from the author.

On paper this is 100% a book I would love , maybe I went in expecting too much , but sadly I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped .
He writing is very chaotic and it took me until at least half way to get used to the style . I didn’t find the characters particularly interesting or the affair , it just wasn’t shouting at me to pick up when I paused .
What I did love however is the NY setting , very vivid descriptions of the streets / areas / buildings and for someone who has visited several times I found myself wandering the streets again . . Also the cover is certainly very eye catching !

I’d describe this book as realistic fiction. The author has done a fantastic job of creating imaginary characters and situations that depict the world and society. The characters focus on themes of growing, self-discovery and confronting personal and social problems. The language is clear, concise, and evocative, with descriptions that bring the setting and characters to life. Dialogue is natural and authentic, and the pacing is well-balanced, with enough tension and release to keep the reader engaged.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

I know a lot of people are sick of “messy woman in the city” but I am literally never sick of “messy woman in the city”.

I absolutely loved this. Deeply my thing. Complicated, messy characters. Beautifully written. Affairs aren’t usually my thing but I loved the way Gabe was written, I loved the contrast of his own sexy messiness with Kate’s coolness and Matt’s stability.

You could argue not a lot happens here but I found it gripping.

I’m looking forward to whatever Miranda Poutney does next!

I had been so looking forward to this one but it just wasn’t the right fit for me when I finally got around to reading it!

I usually love a novel based in NYC and this is what initially lured me in and whilst I can appreciate Pountney’s writing, I just couldn’t connect with the story nor the characters on the level I expected to making it a little hard to get through.

That being said, I am looking forward to seeing what else this author releases as perhaps it may be more for me having enjoyed her writing style!

On paper this is 100% a book I would love , maybe I went in expecting too much , but sadly I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped .
He writing is very chaotic and it took me until at least half way to get used to the style . I didn’t find the characters particularly interesting or the affair , it just wasn’t shouting at me to pick up when I paused .
What I did love however is the NY setting , very vivid descriptions of the streets / areas / buildings and for someone who has visited several times I found myself wandering the streets again . . Also the cover is certainly very eye catching !

Dylan is supposed to be having an amazing life living in New York, but she feels at a dead end and so quits her job and apartment and takes a job house-sitting and caring for an artist’s cat while planning to work on writing her book. Invited to a party by a neighbour, Kate, she meets and begins an affair with Kate’s husband, despite having her own boyfriend who is currently working in San Francisco. Further complications are inevitable. This book very much follows the current fashion for clever, emotionally restrained analyses of difficult relationships, and will be enjoyed by fans of Sally Rooney and Megan Nolan. Well-written in a coolly detached, sardonic style, I found it uninvolving and disliked the characters, but I think I am somewhat older than the target audience and it just wasn’t my kind of book.

cooly affected, how to be somebody else feels derivative of other novels featuring self-sabotaging women mired in ennui who become involved with married couples (I mean...Quartet by Jean Rhys).

This one is such a powerful, emotional read which I didn't expect reading the synopsis. Loved the NYT setting and the character driven aspect. I think it's one of those where readers will either eat this up or be confused as to why others will like it.

I really enjoyed this book. Yes, there were elements that were maddening and, at times, it meandered rather than flew. But that is what life can be like, particularly in your 20s. It felt authentic and true, and brilliantly observed and captured.

How to Be Somebody Else is Miranda Poutney's debut novel. Dylan is in a job she hates and a relationship she doesn't seem to like much either. She quit her job to start on her novel. Starts an affair with the married man downstairs. An attempt to upend her life and be somebody else.

The elements of this book are right up my street - NYC, literary references interspersed, chaotic relationships. For whatever reason, this just didn't land for me unfortunately. I have no doubt that other readers will connect with Dylan more strongly and enjoy HTBSE.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the Publishers for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. I couldn't care for the characters that I found a bit outlandish and loved the plot.
Chaotic, multilayered, fascinating. I loved the descriptions of living in NYT and would have like to be still at the moment when you wonder what will remain and what is just passing.
Having lived 20 years as working nomad I know about that question and there's no answer
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The synopsis of this book spoke to me as did the gorgeous cover. I had this one saved for a while and finally read it over the last few days. Maybe my expectations were too high because on the surface, this had everything I look for in a book and yet I found it quite hard work, especially until the halfway point or the point of no return, in my mind.

It probably took me until halfway to fully get used to the authors writing style and on another day with a tbr pile the size of mine, I may have given up on this one. However, I persevered and I did enjoy the second half of the book stronger than the first although I never felt any connection with Dylan, the main character or any of her circle. I am usually a fan of the messy girl novel but usually because I can identify with at least one of the character so this one fell short for me. Once I got used to the writing style , I began to appreciate it more and I would absolutely read more from this author. Overall I liked the messaging in this one and it did make me smile a couple of times but equally it felt a little bit like hard work at times.

A conflicted three stars.

This book is a bit hard to get into and I struggled to get into the mind of the character for the majority of the book. I feel like the style of writing was chaotic which I usually really enjoy, but in this fell flat. My overall feelings towards the book changed in part 2 and I started to enjoy a lot more, possibly because of the moshfegh kind of style in the last few chapters (who is my favourite author).

This is the debut novel of a London based writer (with a BA in English Literature from Oxford University and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University).

The close third party narrator is Dylan, Oxford educated and from a happy family background; “the guilty secret [she and her father] share, this love for her mother, which is total. Unfashionable, Sally insists, to feel this way about a mother, especially for a writer, but there’s nothing to be done.”

At the age of thirty she took a decision to move to New York where at the book’s opening, some 8 years later in 2015 (with both a Brexit vote and a Trump run for Presidency imminent), she is working at a job she increasingly despises at an advertising agency (working on an updated pitch for New York itself).

In the opening chapter she spontaneously walks out on her job (notionally to start writing fiction although very little writing seems to occur), rents our her apartment and house and cat sits (for free) in the large apartment of an artist she contacts only online. None of this does she share with her longtime boyfriend Matt (who lives on the West Coast working in “FemTech” – seemingly a fertility app).

Shortly after at a party hosted by Kate, the owner of the flat below, she meets Gabe (a bar piano player) and the two start an affair even though Gabe is married to Kate (although he implies the marriage is now little more than a convenience).

At one point Dylan remembers a relationship she had at Oxford with a man who broke up as he said they were not suited as long term partners but who later came out and reflects when thinking of if she could use this autobiographical material for her fiction: “there would need to be changes—where they met, family background—as it was too privileged a pain to be sympathetic. …. And gay guy, straight girl has been done before, it’s not new pain.”

And while I think this is a deliberately knowing reference I found it hard not to feel the same about this novel:

Privileged characters it is very hard to feel any sympathy for – I struggled to engage with Dylan and her group of American friends in New York, only to struggle even more when she returns to her well-off family for a funeral in England

And single (but in a relationship) girl, married guy has been done so many times. To the extent it had a different twist it seemed partly borrowed from “Conversations with Friends”, and the other development was of the relatively predictable fictional fecundity trope.

And the writing felt a little uneven – borrowing from different tropes: at times really quite self-referentially literary (Clarice Lispector quotes) or arty (Noguchi and others); at times more of the include Google-searches in the test school; and then consciously but for me jarringly with occasional forays into Moshfegh gross-out/scatological detail.

Overall really not a novel for me.

Unfortunately I didn't love this book. I thought it would be absolutely perfect for me but I struggled to get into the mind of our protagonist. I hated the cheating plotline to be perfectly honest.

I really enjoyed this book. more so as I spent fifteen years in advertising. Pountney is on point in her description of marketing etc. The plot moved along at just the right speed providing many opportunities to laugh out loud.
Dylan is a successful ad exec who disillusioned quits her job in the middle of yet another boring egotistical agency meeting. Her aim is to find herself. and write Given that she is on a green card with no more money coming in she sublets her apartment and apartment sits for a woman we never meet.
On the day of moving in Kate, her neighbour, invites her to a house warming gathering. Here she quickly hooks up with her husband, Gabe. Their relationship allows her to ignore the problems she has with her long distance boyfriend Matt but proves dangerous in the end..Written from the perspective of Dylan we are often presented with disjointed thoughts as she attempts to hold herself together and question what it is she actually wants to do.The observations of New York are razor sharp as is her quick trip to UK. and the NHS system.
By the end there is a sense of realisation that planning ones next move is often the barrier to real happiness. Why not just be.

Thank you Netgalley for allowing me to read this early

I found this book really hard to get into. The writing style is not my favourite, it's very rarefied, stream of consciousness, word association and no quote marks in the dialogue whatsoever. I don't think that is a bad style of writing per se, but I personally don't enjoy it. I actually contemplated not finishing it until I hit the 10% mark which is more or less when the character of Gabe is introduced. That might genuinely be too late for some people who might have already decided to DNF from feeling no connection to the main character.
I think the current political and economic situation where everyone is struggling to pay their rent and their bills and not many can afford to do what they really want to in life perhaps isn't the best time for this kind of storyline to come out and it's normal to feel some hostility towards it.

Hmmm. I think I may have missed the point of this book since I didn't really think it unsettling at all.

The story follows Dylan, an English woman, who decides to give up her job in advertising and sub-let her flat as an AirBnB while she goes to flat/cat sit for another woman but still in New York. She doesn't tell her friends or her boyfriend (who lives on the west coast) what she's done. Her plan is to write the novel she's been contemplating for a while. However once she's moved in she meets Gabe and Kate, her downstairs neighbours and begins an affair with Gabe.

So the writing is good and it's a mainly easy read but, for me, it wasn't particularly original. It's just a finding oneself sort of thing with an inadvisable affair thrown in. Dylan doesn't appear to do any writing and the main action appears to be the weather and her affair with a man who is clearly no stranger to playing away from home. Of course Dylan misreads Gabe's actions a lot but then don't we all want something to mean as much to the other person as it does to us?

At one point Dylan returns to England for a funeral but even there she doesn't really seem to do a lot. She does find some things out about herself during this "sabbatical" from ordinary life but otherwise its a messy sort of novel that goes in circles more than forwards.

If you like a messy girl novel then you'll probably enjoy it. As I said, the writing is good and this wouldn't put me off reading more by Miranda Pountney.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the advance review copy.

'This is right up your alley,' a friend excitedly told me when I started reading Miranda Pountney's 'How to Be Somebody Else'. And for the most part she was right - I am a devotee of wistful literature in which chic women suffer quietly and this novel is exactly the kind of thing I'd usually be into. I loved the first sections - Pountney's protagonist Dylan hates her job, wonders through the park and watches everyone around her, seemingly a side character in her own life. She has everything a young professional working in the city could want: a perfect, sensitive boyfriend, a job that pays her to do seemingly very little and a British accent which situates her in a superior position to the kinds of academic, intellectual people that populate her life and buy into that sort of snobbery. But she's lost, and uncomfortable and itching for mischief, which arrives in the form of a downstairs-neighbour romantically entangled with someone else. And 'How to Be Somebody Else'.

Pountney knows exactly how to write young people rubbing up against each other - the best parts of this novel are the uncomfortable conversations Dylan has with the people around her. There's a fantastic dinner party scene, so thrilling in its nastiness it made me sit up in bed. The novel also shines when Dylan returns to the UK and must confront the mess of her American life from a distance. Here, Pountney gets right that the people that populate your life ultimately make it what it is.

It is difficult not to compare Pountney to that other Famous New Author who specialises in the specifric brand of melodrama with which Pountney seems to be interested. And of course to describe 'How to Be Somebody Else' as Rooney-esue may be cliche and reductive but Rooney is famously the Patron Saint of Modern Emotional Repression, and indeed you would be forgiven for confusing, at times, this novel with Rooney's 'Conversations with Friends' - both protagonists enter into clandestine relationships with married men and both employ the metaphor of motherhood and reproductive difficulty for some kind of emotional release. These sections wherein Dylan becomes preoccupied with her lover and the complications he presents are the less successful parts of the novel. I found the scenes with Dylan's spiky, hilarious friends and the difficulty with her career to be the more interesting dynamic of the novel, but they were mostly sidelined for what may be a borderline psychotic leading man. The story is sexy, but there are far more interesting things happening outside of the bubble Dylan creates with her man. Maybe that's the point.

The dialogue is fun and stunning, and the protagonist compels. There is certainly a beating heart at the center of this strange, beguiling novel. I just wish it beat a little harder.