I am a huge fan of How I Met Your Mother so when I learned Carter Bays wrote a book I was so excited. This book has his usual goofy tone and I loved it. It was a little long at times but I truly loved feeling like I was a part of the characters’ lives. All in all it was really entertaining and I enjoyed it.

Sharply written with keen observations this was a great one. I loved seeing this colorful cast of characters and all the connections. It took a minute to keep them all straight but once I did I loved it.
Thank you #Dutton and #NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

To my friends at Dutton, thank you for sending me a copy of The Mutual Friend. I was so excited to read this as I loved How I Met Your Mother but unfortunately this just wasn't for me.

I attempted reading it but was completely overwhelmed (and bored at times) by the authors attention to minute detail. I decided to switch to listening to the audiobook (love the narrator) but then found it hard to keep all the characters straight. I ultimately decided to DNF this one but have passed on my copy to a friend who did love it!

This was such a charming novel! I loved the wits of all of the characters. It was a tad long but it was a unique book!

I was excited about the rom-commy-ness of this, but I found that there were way too many characters and waaaaay too many pages for me to get totally into it. It's almost like...ensemble comedies are best executed...on television?? Hmmm...

A really sweet story of a girl just trying to get her life going. You'll root for the main character throughout. Moving and thoughtful.

I truly can tell that this book was written by a straight man who was never given honest feedback after his initial success. This book was torture to consume.

I got about 75 pages in and after several attempts, am putting this one aside. The writing style was not for me & it was very wordy. Cool concept & I've had friends rave about this one but it's a DNF for me.

I feel a little bit mixed in my feelings about this book because on the one hand I really like to see books that take a lot of characters and tie all of their lives together, but on the other hand, this book was a really long one and felt a little choppy in the way that it jumped from one character to the next. At over 400 pages, this read was quite the undertaking, but if you like TV shows like Friends or How I Met Your Mother or Seinfeld, this is most likely a read that you will enjoy.

This book was, unfortunately, not for me. I decided not to finish it after struggling through 150 pages. I love How I Met Your Mother, so I was looking forward to reading this one, but I found it far too convoluted and wandering for my taste. I kept putting it down and not having the urge to pick it back up. I think an ensemble cast and many tangents worked so well in How I Met Your Mother but didn't work in this format for me.

The Mutual Friend is clever and darkly funny with interesting characters that weave in and out of each other’s orbits. The main character – if the book can be said to have one – is Alice, a nanny who, floundering for purpose, decides to make good on a promise she made to her late mother to go to medical school. But it’s also about her roommate and her job, and her brother and his search for enlightenment, and her sister-in-law and her health issues, the guy her roommate dated once and his checkered romantic history, and another guy her brother did jury duty with and his ailing father, and so on, and all the tiny ways people’s lives connect and intersect. My only complaint is that most of the main characters are white (or if they are POC it's not stated outright.) The book also examines and skewers many of the trappings of modern life and internet culture like social media, smartphones, time-sucking mobile apps, trashy reality TV, internet addiction, and online public shaming, and gets philosophical about the reality or unreality of the world we experience through the internet and our phones.

It’s a slice-of-life story with a large cast of characters, so if you feel like you need heavy plot or action to find a book compelling, maybe skip this one. I found it to be sometimes funny, sometimes dark, sometimes profound, and overall, really quite beautiful. Five stars.

Representation: trans character, minor characters of color

CW: sexual harassment, slut shaming, bad drug trips, suicide

I thought enjoyed this book! It was smart and funny and unique. I loved the random occurrences that weren't random. I loved the computers, and phones and robots and technology. I loved all the relationships and all the characters.

If Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother ever wrote a novel, it would be this book. Like Ted, it's warm-hearted, full of big ideas, and a little bit pretentious. This is not shocking, given that debut author Carter Bays is one of the creators of HIMYM. The story is set in 2015 in New York City, which seemed like an odd choice (why set it so close to the present but not quite?), but eventually made sense to me. The narrator is an unseen, omnipotent, first-person presence. We mainly follow Alice, drifting twenty-something nanny who is having a hard time making herself sign up for the MCAT and following her dream to become a doctor. There's also Alice's outgoing roommate, Roxy. And Alice's retired tech millionaire brother Bill and his ambitious wife Pitterpat (yes, that's her name). Plus a host of other characters, many of whom exist in their own private spaces until the plot threads bring them together.

This is not a perfect book, but in the end I quite enjoyed it. I was rooting for Alice and everyone around her. I'll be interested to see what Bays does next.

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the ARC to review. All opinions are my own.

This book wasn't what I was expecting, and not in the way you hope a great book will be. I didn't hate it, but I was expecting a fun rom-com, and it was much more literary fiction than that. The storylines were hard to follow at times, as small characters popped up and then weren't mentioned again until 100 pages later. Overall, I appreciated the commentary on the digital world that takes up so much of our lives and how interconnected we all are, but the story missed the mark.

I think I just read the start of Carter Bays's new tv show, and it's going to be great. Instead of focusing on a group of friends, here he spreads the attention among several New Yorkers who are interconnected in ways they don't even know about. Most of the characters are in their 20s or 30s and are quite attached to social media, which becomes one of the ways that they find and lose each other.

Is it possible that one too many storylines were included here? Yes, probably. I feel like there were a couple that could have been minimized, if not eliminated, without damaging the overall thrust of the book. However, even those characters added to overall gestalt of the book in a positive way.

Bays has a deft hand with dialogue and scene setting and all the things that go into a successful TV show. It turns out he's also pretty good with narrative flow, and puts it all together to make a pretty darn good book.

4.25 stars. Stick with this book. There is a period of time in the plot where I wondered as a reader if it was ever going to go anywhere. I stuck with it because other reviewers said it was worth it- and it was. I really enjoyed this book. The characters are trying to find their path in life, and everyone is going at it differently. I loved how everyone- even seemingly random characters and side story lines- came together at the end. I wish I knew a little more about where Roxy was heading in her life at the end of the story- we got hints, but she was the only one where I would've liked a few more details. This is a perfect summer read- not too taxing on the brain, but also quality writing that comes together and makes you smile. I highly recommend this book- life is difficult and reading something that will make you happy at the end and appreciate the author's talent is totally worth it. Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me to read this as an ARC!

I agree with the reviewers who said that this novel flits from character to character. The author nails the distracted and frenetic feeling of scrolling on your phone all day. But, I didn’t find that particularly compelling.

Alice has been saying she is going to go to medical school for years. At twenty eight, it is time she buckled down and studied for her MCATs. But, there is that dating app, her roommate’s foibles, her brother and sister-in-law’s life, possible love interests, not to mention all those social media apps clamoring for her attention. And so it goes……

This book reminds me of some films I’ve seen with loose connections between and among people and how they intersect. There is a wide cast of characters here, some who appear fleetingly, disappear, and then pop up again later. Some move back and forth in time as we learn their stories.

Bays satirically presents an acutely jaundiced, but accurate view of our always connected culture. Some of it is brilliant, some of it absurd. The writing is sharp, but the length of some segments can interfere with that.

The book is refreshing, fun, pertinent, but, for me, a bit too long.

I was intrigued by the premise of this book and can honestly say it was a book that I'll remember for the fact that it was difficult to pigeon hole. I had a hard time getting into the book. I started it several times, there were so many characters and I wasn’t connecting with any of them. I'm glad I finally stuck with it (It was a serious contender for a DNF) and was surprised the author wrapped up the ending so well. I think this book will appeal to readers who enjoy watching sitcoms as the author is the co creator and writer of the tv show How I Met Your Mother.

I don't know how I feel about this book. When I first started it I was ready to DNF it. it was so choppy and kept jumping to different people and I was so confused. I decided to keep going though. Am I glad I did? Not sure. I liked the story, and how everything wrapped up and was connected in the end, but it was way too long. I'm also just not sure about the structure of the book overall. I think it will work for some people and be an easy five star read. I however, am sadly not that person.