Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by 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 social interactions, 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 on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

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Woo hoo, another great book club pick! Eleanor Oliphant is totally not fine, at least to the average person. Eleanor seems to just exist – goes to work, goes home, repeat. She isn’t happy with her life and that’s ok with her. She is fine.

It took me a bit to get into Eleanor’s “fine” life. It was odd. Kind of like watching Sheldon and Amy in the Big Bang Theory. What they would consider average or normal, isn’t what I would classify as normal.

Then Eleanor meets Raymond and she is forced to go outside of her normal routine and have a social life. I really liked Raymond and I loved that this isn’t a romance novel, it’s about friendship. The author peels Eleanor back and shows that there is so much more to her than what the reader first thought.

3 calculators out of a potential 5. I liked the novel, but didn’t love it like a lot of other readers. I found that it was an easy novel to read that dealt with a lot of heavier topics.

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