eleanor oliphant is completely fine a novel

(I laughed out loud during her interaction with a manicurist, particularly.) I hated her until suddenly. She’s acerbic, aloof, unbearably awkward, rude, and her lack of social skills is astounding. The journey to saving Eleanor from herself took me a few chapters to settle into. To go from black and white to radiant color. But underneath his collection of bad graphic t-shirts is a giant heart of absolute freakin’ gold, which is exactly what Eleanor needs to pry her out of a profoundly damaging way of living.

She finds him unhygienic, clumsy, boorish. But that all changes when she meets her office’s new IT guy, Raymond. Whether it’s a Friday meal of frozen pizza and vodka, or a Wednesday phone call with her brutal, cruel, and incarcerated mother (sorry, Mummy), she seems primed for the breakdown to end all breakdowns, to say the least. In addition to struggling with appropriate social skills and her lack of any conversational filters, the 29-year-old Glasgow resident lives a rigid life doing the same thing at the same time every week. Furthermore, though the story swings into extremely dark and crushing moments more often than I was expecting (not complaining, by the way) there’s such a vital sense of kindness at its core that made it hard not to feel tied to these characters, and deeply affected by them.Ĭhief among them, of course, is Eleanor herself - she’s stuck so far down in a rut of her own making she’s long since forgotten what existing as anything other than “fine” even is. It’s quirky in that The Rosie Project and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? kind of way, written with a sense of humor that often flies above the head of its own protagonist. And by all that I mean: wow, I loved Eleanor Oliphant. But, as I happily discovered after finishing another über beloved book last summer, sometimes the hype is very much worth it. That’s been the case for quite a few super-popular novels I’ve read lately, where I go in with my expectations high only to be disappointed.

I was expecting Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman to be.

Eleanor oliphant is completely fine a novel