Reviews

Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety by Alex Graudins

jkenna1990's review

4.0

In this, we follow the author as she describes her life with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and tries to overcome it by doing stand-up comedy. She goes through all of the different improv games and exercises to try to come out of her shell and it works! She starts to make new friends and explore parts of herself that she's been hiding. Overall, I think that this is a cute book with an interesting story.

zbrarian's review

3.0

Great message relayed in this book: it’s ok to fail forward. The memoir part of the story was good, learning about how the author overcame paralyzing social anxiety through improv. Kind of felt like an “improv for dummies” book. Definitely geared towards an older audience.

meghan111's review

2.0

For me there were way too many descriptions of different improv theater exercises. I liked the art and thought the parts about social anxiety were well done, but this never came together. Also the note about the end about whiteness and racism in improv could have been added into the main part of the book as it was way more interesting than the preponderance of improv exercise descriptions, and I definitely noted a lack of racial diversity in the people depicted in the memoir. Curious what people with a theater or drama or improv background would think of this.

ecallahan's review

informative medium-paced

3.5

thenextgenlib's review

4.0

Really loved this book, but it seemed a bit too long. I took one star for that, but overall loved the focus on mental health and how improv helped the author.

hkent80's review

emotional hopeful inspiring sad fast-paced

2.5

spiffysarahruby's review

5.0

Loved this! I think I may have found my book club book for next April!

mcnemesis's review

emotional informative inspiring medium-paced

4.0

ebony27's review

4.0

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed reading Alex's improve, to put it simply! I have anxiety and was interested in hearing this perspective of it as I'm sure every other introvert or anxious person physically shudders when someone says improve.

It was interesting to hear Alex's experience with this and how improve was part of their anxiety journey. I found it very brave and quite inspiring.

Alex's artwork, scenes and colours were all stunning and made the book a wonderful read.

unnamedcryptid's review

funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted tense fast-paced

5.0

I love the format of this! It was cool having the improv games explained in between the memoir bits of the story.