Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Awkward Eleanor.
There has been an audible buzz about the book, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I seem to be hearing about it and seeing the cover all over the place. The title continuously appears on one book club list after another; members of The Great American Read Facebook group sang its praises; and two of my friends (one in Australia) have read it and loved it! So, it was about time I put it to the test, and it passed with flying colors!
Eleanor Oliphant lives a reclusive, robotic existence. She sticks to her regiment of going to work, eating her nightly pesto pasta for supper, pizza on Friday evenings, and downing chianti and two bottles of vodka on the weekends. Socially stunted, Eleanor, does not interact well with others. She’s blunt, analytical, at times sarcastic, and just plain weird. She can’t see how out of touch she is and thinks it’s the people around her who are the ones lacking social skills when they react to her oddities. And that’s okay, because for the most part she feels no need to mingle with others. She’s just fine all by herself, until one day she and a co-worker help a man who falls to the ground.
And that’s the beginning of an odyssey into outings to the hospital, then parties, luncheons, and other-worldly situations for her. As she forms a friendship with her co-worker, readers slowly discover what turned Eleanor into a woman who would take social cues from animals and consider “What would a ferret do,” or “How would a salamander respond to this situation?”[1]
I absolutely loved this novel! Eleanor had me laughing throughout the book with her deadpan observations. She reminded me of the professor in The Rosie Project which I also loved. From a bikini wax, to dancing, to just ordering a coffee, she had me in fits of laughter, at times with tears streaming down my face. And yet she also broke my heart when her own family history was slowly revealed. Eleanor Oliphant is completely, absolutely marvelous.
Here are some lines to entice you:
“Human mating rituals are unbelievably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking and play fights don’t quite cut the mustard.”
Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine(New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 64.
“Men like Raymond, pedestrian dullards, would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide.”
Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine(New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 104.
When the music was too loud in a café:
“It was, I thought, the sound of madness, the kind of music that lunatics hear in their heads just before they slice the heads off foxes and throw them into their neighbor’s back garden.”
Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine(New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 156
This book was a book club selection, and was a big hit with everyone! All of us loved the story, Eleanor herself, and Raymond, who was such a compassionate person not just to Eleanor, but also to his mom and the man who collapsed on the street. And although my book club members don't necessarily look forward to sequels, we are all hoping this journey continues. Finally, we are all looking forward to seeing Eleanor Oliphant when it comes out in the theater early 2020.
Happy Reading,
Annette
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