I’m Fine and Neither Are You is a 2019 literary
fiction novel by Camille Pagan. It was released in April by Lake Union Press. I stumbled upon it while browsing
Amazon one day and the title intrigued me. It’s a Washington Post best
selling novel. It can be purchased here
The novel follows Penelope Ruiz-Kar, a married mother of two
who seems to be doing it all and barely keeping it together. Her best friend
Jenny, meanwhile, seems to have the perfect life and marriage. Jenny’s shocking
death reveals that her life was far from perfect, leading Penelope to decide to
truly confront the problems in her life, starting with her and her husband Sanjay
committing to complete and total honesty. As Penelope’s vow to stop keeping the
peace turns her life upside down, she begins to wonder if honesty really is the
best policy.
First, I feel like I should say that I probably wasn’t the
target demographic for this story. While this is adult fiction, and I am an
adult, a 26-year-old single woman with no kids is going to have different tastes
than a married woman, a parent or someone who is a little older. I didn’t find
tis book to be terrible, but it also wasn’t especially interesting to me. The story
started off interestingly enough, but it honestly began to feel like it was
going anywhere special. The story centers around a woman trying to fix her
semi-broken marriage, which isn’t especially interesting to read and didn’t leave
me feeling much of anything.
Penelope spends most of the novel thinking about the way her
marriage used to be and how happy she once was with Sanjay. Or contemplating how
her job makes her a decent living, but its not really what she’s passionate
about. Or how confused and frustrated she is about the secrets Jenny was
keeping from her that she learned after her death. It’s a story where the main character thinks
about a lot of things, but very little plot happens. Additionally, Penelope isn’t
a main character that I enjoyed. I felt like she didn’t have much personality
and the most prevalent personality trait that she did have was whininess. Both
before and after Jenny’s death, which serves as the inciting incident of the
story, Penelope does a lot of thinking about how she wishes her life were
different, she thinks about the problems she’s just been ignoring, but it takes
an exceptionally long time for her to say or do anything about it. Some of her
actions, which are supposed to feel selfless, read as very selfish or self-obsessed
to me, especially where Jenny’s family are involved. Scenes that are meant to
be read as empathetic instead feel like an excuse for her to talk about herself
and problems she’s had in the past. Between a plot that crawled along and a
main character I didn’t like, the book was very hard for me to stick with and
enjoy.
I think the most frustrating aspect of this novel is that it
did have potential. Jenny’s death, and the cause was the reader learns later,
was a good opening to talk about an issue that’s very topical in 2019. I’m
Fine and Neither Are You could’ve used the set-up to actually discuss the
current issue and show it from many different sides. It could’ve focused on the
grieving process itself and how to struggle with grieving someone while also
being angry at the secrets they kept. These elements feature in the story, but
end up taking a backseat to the marriage melodrama. (As an aside, perhaps I’ve
read too many thrillers, but I half expected Jenny’s death to have actually
been a murder and thus add something to the story). A story doesn’t have to be
a sweeping epic to keep my attention, but the story does need to go somewhere. Something
needs to happen, and for the most part, nothing really happened here other than
Penelope thinking a lot and her talking to other people a little bit.
This review has been negative so far, but there are some
aspects I think the story does well. Penelope and Sanjay’s relationship is one
of the most realistic ones I’ve read in a while. I know plenty of people in
real life whose marriages look an awful lot like theirs. They don’t hate each
other, but clearly a lot of the romance has gone and they’re in the stage where
things have become routine. The conclusion of the story is also realistic. Some
changes take place, but no one’s life has become drastically different. It’s frustratingly
mundane. The author isn’t a bad writer, but the story being told is far from
interesting or exciting in my opinion.
I’m Fine and Neither Are You is just as its title says.
It’s fine. It’s not great, but it’s also not the worst book I’ve ever read. If I
had to assign it a color, the color would be beige. Boring, safe and doesn’t stand
out in any way. I think my experience with this book shows that I need to pay a
little bit less attention to how highly-recommended a book is on the internet as
a whole. This book is a best-seller and the composite rating is high, but just
because 20k+ people like it doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for me. It’s a
short read. You can easily pass time reading it, but I don’t agree with the
reviews saying that this book is interesting or deep or life-changing.
Rating: 2.4 stars
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