Best to Laugh is cheerfully outlandish, filled with ambition, love, adventure, kindness, swimming pools, nightclubs, and baked goods. Best of all, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Best to Laugh had me laughing out loud. It’s both funny and tender, and filled with memorable characters. You can’t help but love Candy Pekkala and her quirky, mixologist grandmother. Lorna Landvik has written a charming novel with real heart.

One of the things that accounts for Lorna Landvik’s immense popularity is the essential good-heartedness she brings to her work. But as much as this is a celebration of a very special time and place, it is even more a celebration of character, desire, friendship, perseverance, and love—oh, and hamburger hot dish.

GREAT NOVEL!!! It reads like an autobiography! Best to Laugh, although fiction, is one of the truest accounts of a Hollywood life one can read. It takes a master of comedy to be able to write about the business of laughter. To interpret its roots and inner working. Lorna Landvik is precisely that. I, for one of many, can attribute countless gut busting laughs to the genius of Lorna. A great nostalgic tale.

Landvik’s novel is happily filled with a double dose of nostalgia—the protagonist’s for the golden age of Hollywood and the author’s for a lovably gritty 1970s Los Angeles.

Filled with historical lore about Hollywood’s glory days, inside observations about the chauvinism that pervades the comedy boys’ club, and a bevy of secondary characters straight out of central casting, Landvik’s homage to funny ladies everywhere is a joyful, breezy trip down memory lane.

While you’re reading along, laughing at the silly characters or stories, empathizing with the struggle of the young comic ‘just trying to make it,’ you’re also acutely aware of just how much this specific young comic has gone through. It’s a powerful combination, one that ensures that while it’s certainly best to laugh, that’s not the only thing you’ll be doing.

Best to Laugh recounts real—poignant and laugh-out-loud funny—experience.

Landvik’s come a long way as a writer, actress and comedian since she lived in Peyton Hall. Now Landvik pays homage to Peyton Hall and “that time and place that’s gone forever” in her new novel Best to Laugh.

Best to Laugh has Landvik’s signature humor—a little corny, a lot sweet—and the sort of friends-become-family characters that defined her best-selling debut Patty Jane’s House of Curl. There is a Steel Magnolias-style of laugh-aw-cry-laugh likability to the tale and the 1970s-ness is so palpable, you can practically hear the whisper-walk of a woman’s silk pantsuit.

The kind of book Landvik readers love. We get the wonderfully nice Midwestern girl we crave in these kinds of books, a host of quirky folks who are also fun to know, a dream in the making, and an ending that might find you reaching for tissues. “Best,” indeed.

While ripe with humor, the protagonist’s narration also serves up wisdom, nostalgia, and heart-wrenching life lessons.

You’ll want to mention this to your book club when you’re done reading it.

A satisfying read that sheds light on the wonders and vicissitudes of life.

Unadorned but vivid.

Best to Laugh is a trip back to the 1970s, to Hollywood, to the stand-up comic stage. It’s a good ready by a funny author and it might just make you want to follow your own dreams a little bit more.

Landvik succeeds in creating a fast paced, highly humorous novel about what it takes to succeed.

It takes a master of comedy to be able to write about the business of laughter.

Laugh-out-loud hilarious.