~ Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine ~

Author: Gail Honeyman

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living. Ultimately, it is Raymond’s big heart that will help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. If she does, she’ll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship—and even love—after all.

Smart, warm, uplifting, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

the only way to survive is to open your heart.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is an easy novel to see why it is popular as it is a very accessible read to explore mental health. Eleanor Oliphant struggles in life at 30 years old where she works five days a week in an office and treats herself to frozen pizza and vodka on the weekends. She does the same routine every day and week, including her phone chats with Mummy. Her story is divided into three parts: Good Days, Bad Days, and Better Days. The reader begins by meeting Eleanor in her routine and this all changes after Eleanor needs to contact her IT department for computer trouble. Here she meets Raymond and the two very slowly connect. Together they end up saving an elderly gentleman named Sammy and the three of them begin an intertwined tale.

Eleanor was a polarizing character as I can see why she was written this way, but she was also very arrogant and judgmental. She not only lacked knowledge about certain social skills, but she also lacked knowledge about the world around her. Some of these just seemed implausible as even those who live a more isolated life have more awareness about the world around them than she did. I did that the author explained the reasoning behind this a little more aside from just adding a “quirkiness” to her character. It is not explicitly said in the novel nor am I diagnosing her, but the writing of her character gave me vibes of someone who potentially has a degree of Asperger’s Syndrome. Again, this was not a diagnosis, but more a way for my own mind to try and understand her character, since my best friend has it, and their traits were just easy to associate with in my mind and just made it simple to imagine this character existing and having certain mannerisms in my head. Eleanor also had parts of her that were very contradictory where she would think one thing and then do the opposite. Since this story is told in 1^st person, I expected more of an explanation. As there didn’t seem to be any most of the time, I wish the story was told in 3^rd person just to have it all flow better.

Eleanor’s journey in the novel was a fascinating one as she began in her closed world and then slowly, she let her guard down. She changed her routine a little, did things to make herself over, and did new activities. There was a lot of realism in her journey, although some of it was accelerated as this is a novel where everything needed to be wrapped up. This was an excellent story to explore loneliness. There were many elements to love about her entire journey and many that could have been explored a little better. I think this novel lived up to the hype as I did enjoy reading it. I do think there were many elements that could have been improved, including the ending as it was easy to predict. This may not be the case for many readers, though, so it may not be an important point for them. Overall, I do think Honeyman is a very talent writer and I would read more from her in the future.