Wait For It Review (A Great HIMYM Book)

Written by Graeme McGaw

Timing is everything – and just as I was sitting here, about to rewatch How I met Your Mother now the Season 9 DVD is being released with the alternate and clearly a million times better ending – the ECW Press Fall release schedule hit my mailbox. In it was The Legen – wait for it -dary story of How I Met Your Mother written by Jesse McLean.

I promptly requested a review copy, and have been rewatching the show while having this handy companion to HIMYM next to me. The book title is Wait For It and it is just a fantastic companion to the series. If you’re also planning to rewatch the show then stop – get this book, and have it sitting there as you watch episode after episode.

This book is just incredibly in-depth and goes through each episode. Every episode has a recap and yeah – you might have just watched the episode, but the recap is more than just a recap. It goes through the authors thoughts as he adds insightful and entertaining commentary, and it’s like watching an episode then immediately hearing someone elses views on it.

Each episode also has a neat section with fun facts. For example – it might point out a plot hole. Episode 108 Marshall says Barney would be a bad room-mate as he cookes naked, then later on it’s established that Barney never even cooks. It’s really neat to read that stuff as it’s clearly someone who has did his homework that has written this book.

That section is called Empire State Building Fun Facts and there are a lot of great ones. One thing I really liked is that the author keeps it honest – for episode 505 for example the author is open in commenting on the Canadian jokes getting stale for example.

One other thing I really liked about the book is where necessary, the author keeps it short. I’ve read these sort of books before and some of them the author just prattles on about the episode when you’re sitting there thinking “Yeah, I just watched that episode!”. However in this book the episode recaps are maybe a page, page and a quarter and it’s something that is great for quickly reading before moving onto the next episode.

Of course you don’t have to watch the show episode by episode, reading immediately after. It’s also good for a trip down memory lane. It was fun just randomly flipping through the book and reading an episode recap and picturing it in my mind. The recaps as I said are with insightful commentary as well as key quotes and are basically the opposite of dry.

The only disappointing thing about the book was that it doesn’t cover ALL episodes. For example the season 5 section covers 501, 505, 509, 511, 514, 522 and 524. It does cover the key episodes and I can understand why the author did this – it would be hard to write that much about a show with this many episodes. I guess it’s a complement really – after watching episode 5 of season 1 for example, I was anxious to get to and watch episode 8 simply so I could read the authors take on it as they skipped 6 and 7.

This is a great book for any How I Met Your Mother fan. If you’re not an HIMYM fan but have some on your christmas list, then this is the perfect gift for them.