Review: 'It's No Fun Anymore' by Brittany Micka-Foos

From frustrated housewives and medical processes to maybe haunted houses, It's No Fun Anymore covers a whole variety of topics I find intriguing. It is something of an investigation of middle-aged female ennui and frustration. As such, Brittany Micka-Foos' collection should have been an immediate winner for me, but something in the execution of it all didn't entirely hit home to me. Thanks to Apprentice House Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this collection in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 17/06/2025
Publisher: Apprentice House Press of Loyola University Maryland

“It’s No Fun Anymore” is a collection of eight stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and their attempts to divine meaning from suffering.

In “The Experiment,” the murder of a young girl prompts a stay-at-home mother to undertake a desperate bid for agency, drawing unlikely inspiration from a 1950s self-help book. An MLM saleswoman in “Border Crossings” is held captive at the Canadian border, and in her marriage. And “Thumb Stump” introduces a new mother who worries her baby will inherit both her perceived deformity and generational trauma.

These stories examine the double binds of motherhood, the sham of “having it all,” the daily struggles. The centralizing thread is the question: How can trauma be transformed?

The stories in Brittany Micka-Foos' collections felt, in some ways, more like extensive vignettes than full stories to me. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, because getting a brief little peek into a life can be fascinating and not everything has to be explained. However, in the case of many of these stories, I felt the need for a little more, either in the sense of context or a more thorough examination of the themes that got brought up. The first story, 'The Experiment' is a good example for this. A stay-at-home mom draws inspiration from a self-help book that praises the divine feminine of the submissive wife and, in the hopes to either find some rest or inspiration for a new book, she sets out to cosplay a tradwife for a while. At the same time, a young girl has gone missing and is found murdered. All of this is a premise I find really intriguing and Micka-Foos takes it in interesting directions. For some reason, however, it doesn't all come together in a way that works for me. The role the murder plays is a little unclear, except I guess for providing an external stressor. The relationship between husband and wife is also not worked out enough that I felt I understood either of their motivations and actions and it left me with something of a bad taste in my mouth. That slightly bad taste remained for many of the other stories and, in some way, this does feed directly into the title of the collection. Sometimes life isn't fun anymore and you end up saddled with all the consequences of your own actions and those of others, with that feeling that something is off which brings everything out of balance. 

Women being pushed to the brink is one of my favourite things to read about. In each of the stories featured in It's No Fun Anymore, Brittany Micka-Foos has a fascinating kernel of a story in which a woman is faced with a moment that feels like a make-or-break situation. In 'The New Jenny', for example, we have a woman recently divorced because her husband found someone younger and more exciting, but Jenny finds a certain strength in her acquisition of a gun. From there, decisions are made and actions undertaken that technically create a very tense situation that is rife for exploration. It is a solid story idea that is largely built up well, and yet, for me, something felt missing. I wasn't connecting to it in the way I wanted to and I can't fully decide whether that was due to something in the writing or to how I was reading/feeling in the moment. I think there are a lot of interesting things at play in It's No Fun Anymore, including a lot of promise when it comes to Micka-Foos' imagination, but this collection isn't necessarily at the top of the list for me. However, I would love to read more by Micka-Foos in the future to see how her craft develops.

I give this collection....

3 Universes!

While I enjoyed all the stories in It's No Fun Anymore, each somehow left me wanting something a little bit more, either in the sense of a resolution or a deeper exploration of the themes. However, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for more by Micka-Foos.