Genre: Show business biography
Publisher: Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Address: 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York, 10020
Author: Anna Kendrick
Title: Scrappy Little Nobody
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1720-6
Copyright© 2016 by 207, INC.
Interior design by Jill Putorti
Illustrations and endpaper design by Robin Eisenberg
Photograph on page 35 by Joan Marcus
Photograph on page 211 by Jeff Kravitz/ Film Magic/ Getty Images
Review by James Colt Harrison
Light and breezy, Anna Kendrick’s unusual biography of her “scrappy nobody” self is quite entertaining in a fluffy way. By saying “fluffy,” I don’t mean that it is a marshmallow. It’s simply Kendrick has a funny, self-deprecating way of looking at herself that makes light of almost every tragedy ever striking her astonishing career. And, if you are like this writer, she is thought of as probably the least likely person to become a star. She’s literally like your little brat sister, the one you wanted to pull her pigtails for ruining your coloring book.
Anna is so familiar and down to earth that I can’t call her Miss Kendrick. So from here on we will resort to her first name, when we aren’t calling her other names. Anna had a remarkable childhood in that she managed to live through it. For instance, her size. She has always been Lilliputian in size, admitting she shopped at Gap Kids for clothes and was a size Double Zero. She always looked ten years old and did until she was almost forty. No, no, she’s not anywhere near forty, but it’s how ridiculously young she has always looked even when an adult. Which she hasn’t become, yet. Her first personal tragedy? Not having her, ahem, dainty collision with “ladyhood” until she was three years beyond the usual age of 13 for it to happen. She tells us everything whether we want to hear it or not. That’s the charm of this amusingly honest book. Anna, please, you have GOT to have some secrets!
It’s impossible to capture her style of personal writing. Let us say it is a breathless, girly account of things that happen to her along the way to getting into show business, and why. She has a very funny outook about everything, even the unfortunate flopped auditions and lost opportunities. She turns it all into a stream-of-consciousness running commentary of events and accidents that helped and hindered her, from growing up to making movies with world-famous actors.
It’s a definitely pleasant read with lots of laughs and questions as to why HER, why did SHE become a movie star? If I could write as well as Anna, I’d be the movie star and not she. I wanted to say “her,” but it’s grammatically incorrect.
