Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a 2019 literary fiction novel by Gail Honeyman. It was published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller. Reese Witherspoon selected it as one of her book club picks and it’s going to become a motion picture in the near future.

The novel follows the titular character Eleanor Oliphant, an accounting clerk in her late twenties living a very lonely and strictly scheduled life. Everything changes when she meets her new coworker Raymond who is determined to find a way to bring Eleanor out of her shell. Along the way, his big heart helps her repair her own heavily damaged one.

To start off, I’d like to point out that this book is not a romance. I know the blurb written above, which I paraphrased from the back of the book, makes it sound like one, but its not. The novel isn’t the story of a man and a woman meeting unexpectedly and falling in love. Instead, it’s a story about an unlikely friendship and said friendship being that catalyst in Eleanor realizing some difficult truths about herself and her past.

This book was recommended to me by a coworker. She’d begun reading it and thought it was an amusing story, which it is at first. At the beginning, Eleanor’s inner monologue is funny. She doesn’t have great social skills, she doesn’t know how to relate to people and doesn’t have a filter. She’s, for lack of a better term, a weirdo and spends a lot of time judging people for perfectly normal behavior that she finds strange. At first, Eleanor’s eccentricities were funny. I was reading about a story about an incredibly strange woman who was wondering why everyone else seemed so strange to her. Before long, however, it stopped being funny. Because Eleanor’s whole life, a boring job, no real connections to anyone, adhering to a strict schedule, is the result of a very troubled upbringing. She strives to be normal, but her childhood makes any idea of “normal” completely impossible. There are small moments of humor, but mostly the book is rather sad.

I don’t want to make it seem like I didn’t enjoy this book, because I did. It was a thorough deep-dive into self-discovery and self-improvement. It also delves into discussion trauma and how it can affect people. The author went out of her way to show Eleanor going through a major change in her life without it changing her personality completely. Eleanor still has her quirks at the end of the book, and she wouldn’t be described as “normal” but she’s in a healthier place. She’s stopped ignoring her problems and confronted some of the issues she’s been burying for so long.

Eleanor is an interesting character, although a tad bit annoying at times. Scenes where she’s being overly judgmental towards people for doing things like not knowing how to respond to something she said, or trying to have a conversation with her are hard to read. Her inability to relate to people makes sense in the context of the story, but until it becomes clear that there’s more to her than just that, she’s difficult to like. Raymond is one of the first people Eleanor really lets in because he seems to accept her exactly as she is. Sure, sometimes if she says something that’s inappropriate he’ll tell her, but he’s not trying to change her. He realizes that she’s not doing well, and wants to help her, but not in a way that’s self-serving. She’s his friend and he wants his friend to get better. Even in moments when Eleanor doesn’t want his help, but needs it. Another character that changes Eleanor’s life is an elderly man Sammy. Shortly after Eleanor and Raymond meet, they save Sammy when he falls and injures himself. Raymond continues to check in on Sammy after he’s taken to the hospital and talks Eleanor into joining him. During these visits, Eleanor starts to open up a bit more to both men and for the first time in a long time, develops a real connection with other people. The last character I want to discuss, and the one who had the biggest impact on Eleanor by far, is Mummy, her mother. Eleanor doesn’t see Mummy but at the beginning of the novel, they talk over the phone every Wednesday night. Mummy is a piece of work to say the least. Several of their calls are depicted in the story, but you only need one to understand their relationship dynamic. Mummy is a terrible mother, abusive in more than one way, and yet everything Eleanor does is in an attempt to please her mother. Mummy is the antagonist of this story, and her connection to Eleanor’s trauma is what propels the story forward.

I liked Eleanor’s character journey. I like the realizations she came to along the way as she let more people in and realized that she wasn't “fine” regardless of how often she claimed to be. What I liked most, however, was that the ending didn’t wrap everything up neatly. Eleanor doesn’t end the book by being completely recovered from her trauma. There isn’t a happy ending, just a realistic one. She’s getting better, her life has improved, but she still has a long way to go.

I didn’t love this book. I also didn’t hate it. I wish that the blurb adhered a little closer to the actual story than it did. Still, it’s an entertaining slice-of-life story while also discussing heavier themes. I’m not eagerly awaiting the motion picture, unlike some other readers I've talked to, but it’s a good book overall.

Rating: 2.9 stars

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I'm Fine and Neither Are You

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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 from Bookshop.org.

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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Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is a 1900 novel written by Theodore Dreiser. It tells the story of an 18-year-old girl from Wisconsin who leaves her rural life behind and moves to Chicago. While in Chicago, Carrie begins realizing her own version of the American Dream. This starts out as her becoming the mistress of a man with higher standing than she does, but progresses to her going into the theater and becoming an actress.

While Dreiser’s novel didn’t see much praise by the general public when it was first published, it did receive positive reviews and has been referred to as one of the greatest American novels. Most of the praise the novel received centers around the sense of realism in the novel. The descriptions of life in New York and Chicago around the turn of the century were praised for how accurate they were, for better or worse. Other praise centered around the novel’s realistic depiction of the human condition, with one review even stating Sister Carrie didn’t have “the slightest trace of sentimentality or pettiness”. Criticism at the time of the novel’s release centered around Dreiser’s writing style, which many found to be lacking and highlighted his own lack of education. There was also criticism over the sexual content it contained, which is laughable by today’s standards, but was shocking in 1900. Somehow, despite the lack of sales and heavy criticism, Sister Carrie survived over a century to the modern day.

While very little of the critique at the time of the novel’s release seem to be about the story itself, most of the things I dislike about Sister Carrie relate to the plot and characters. To be blunt, I don’t like any characters in this story. Carrie is fickle and seems to only care about furthering her own social standing, to the point of me hoping she gets run over by a trolley. She had dreams of moving to the big city and being rich, which there’s nothing wrong with, but everyone who tries to bring her down to reality is entirely written off. Carrie wants what she wants and at no point do other people factor into her behavior at all. George Hurstwood, who is one of the men Carrie has an affair with, not only cheats on his wife and steals from his employer, for Carrie no less, but he doesn’t seem to grasp how little the object of his affection truly cares for him.

Most other characters are one-dimensional at best, serving a purpose only to further along the plot. Carrie’s sister Minnie wants Carrie to focus on getting a new job after losing her old one and when she can’t, or doesn’t want to, Minnie’s family can’t support her which sets off the chain of events that leads to Carrie becoming someone’s mistress. One of her neighbors in New York serves the sole purpose of making Carrie dissatisfied with what she already has, which is remarkably more than most other New Yorkers.

My main issue with Sister Carrie is the plot itself. I spent the entire length of the novel waiting for Carrie to run into an obstacle. Any obstacle. She doesn’t get the part she wants, or someone from her past resurfaces, or she loses what she’s already gained. None of that happens. Carrie goes from one high point, to another and never pays for any of her actions. She has setbacks, but they never set her back too far or inspire any kind of change. This plot I’d be more likely to accept if she wasn’t such an awful person. At the end of the novel, Carrie’s rich and famous, but not happy, and comes to the conclusion that if she isn’t happy now, perhaps she’ll never be.

Sister Carrie is an American classic and like most other classics, that doesn’t make it enjoyable. If I were to rate every classic I’ve ever read, this one would probably rate pretty low. None of the characters are interesting or even likable, the plot is meandering and has no real flow to it, and overall, its just boring.

Rating: 1.4 stars

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Nothing to See Here

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Nothing to See Here is a 2019 novel by Kevin Wilson. It was published in October of 2019 by Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins. It became a New York Times Bestseller and was named a Best Boom of the Year by New York Time Book Review, The Washington Post, People and several other newspapers and magazines. The novel can be purchased here from Bookshop.org.

The novel tells the story of Lillian, a young woman who works a dead-end job when she’s suddenly contacted by a close friend from her old boarding school Madison. Despite having not seen her for ten years, Madison reaches out to Lillian asking for help with her stepchildren who will soon be coming to live with the family. Lillian agrees to be the children’s caretaker and its only after agreeing to take the position that she learns the twins have a strange affliction- whenever they become upset or angry, they catch fire. Despite the strangeness of the situation, Lillian and the twins begin to trust each other and stay cool, but the machinations of Madison’s politician husband may ruin everything.

The story is, when boiled down to its basic elements, a family drama wrapped up in a story of magical realism. As a result, as with most family dramas, there aren’t an abundance of characters. There are only five or six characters that are seen often enough and given enough personality to warrant discussing. Lillian is the point-of-view character and at the beginning, she’s directionless. She has a dead-end job, a dead-end life and it seems like she agrees to Madison’s proposal because she doesn’t have a reason not to. Once the twins enter the picture, her interactions with them start to show the reader the person she really is. She’s also, seemingly, the only person in the story who isn’t overly perturbed by the situation. The twins are 10-year-olds Bessie and Roland, and they’re actually pretty sweet kids. When I read the blurb for Nothing to See Here, I was expecting the “kids who catch fire when they get upset” characters to behave sort of like Draco Malfoy. I thought I’d hate them; they’d be complete brats who use their gift to terrorize any nanny, teacher or authority figure who told them “no”. Instead, they’re just lost children. They both have issues they need to work through, mostly focused on their mother’s death and their father abandoning them when he divorced their mother, but from almost the first time they appear, it’s clear that the twins are just as scared of their abilities as anyone else. Madison is Lillian’s old friend and Bessie and Roland’s stepmother. She appears to be the perfect wife for a Senator and lives the perfect life. I won’t lie, I hate Madison. I was supposed to hate her. Madison is a character that’s all about appearance and meeting expectations. She went to a prestigious boarding school, because she came from a wealthy family; she went to an elite college because that’s what was expected of her; she married a politician and had an adorable, well-behaved son because that’s exactly what she was supposed to do. Everything she does in the story is about making sure that the family’s image, and her husband’s political ambitions, don’t run into any roadblocks. The twins need to be kept out of sight, with no one aware of their abilities, because it could cause the Senator some unneeded press coverage. Lastly, there is the Senator, Jasper Roberts. He’s a Senator, one who could become the next Secretary of State and by far, the closest thing this story has to a true villain. He’s a complete and total jerk and that’s the nicest way I can say it. if Madison’s main focus is split between the family’s image and Jasper’s ambitions, then his is solely on his political aspirations. He’s decided he going to become the next Secretary of State, and no one, not even his children, are going to get in the way of that. When first introduced, he just seems like an arrogant man, a stereotypical politician who talks a lot but means nothing, As the story progresses, you realize that Jasper only cares about Jasper. He divorced the twins’ mother and decided to pretend like they didn’t even exist and weren’t related to him anymore. He barely interacts with any other characters for much of the story, but when he does appear, I want to crawl into the book and deck him in the face. As I said, he cast of characters is very small.

Nothing to See Here is by far the funniest book I’ve read om 2019. Wilson does an excellent job of mixing humor into a story that would otherwise be a very somber, or downright tragic one. Rather than avoid illuminating the weirdness of the characters or the bizarreness of the situation they’re in, he leans into it, which not only makes the story unique, but compels the reader to keep turning the page. The characters are quirky and strange and the narrative embraces that before using the humor to hit the reader in a way they didn’t see coming. The plot is original in a way no other book I’ve read this year is. Wilson’s skills as a writer must be commended, as not many could take such a strange concept and make it work so effortlessly.

While I did enjoy the book overall, I did feel slightly let down by the ending. I was happy to see that the twins and Lillian all ended up in a situation that was good for them. The resolution of what should happen with the twins was the best possible outcome that the story could have. It was as close to a “happy ending” as one could hope for. The thing that disappointed me were the lack of consequences for other characters though. Jasper never gets what he deserves. Neither does Madison for that matter. They face some consequences, but not as many or as severe as I would’ve liked. While I couldn’t find a smug satisfaction at how Jasper and Madison’s storylines ended, they do reflect the most realistic outcomes. In the real world, a Senator and his wife would get off the hook with little to no real consequences. Still, I would’ve liked at least one of them to be hurt a little more by the result of their own actions. My disappointment at the conclusion is probably a sign of Wilson capturing the real world so effective. Things aren’t wrapped up neatly in a nice little bow, regardless of how much we want them to be.

Nothing to See Here is an inventive, hilarious story. It stands out as one of the best books I’ve read this year. I found the premise very refreshing and I could’ve read another 200 pages and still wanted more. Kevin Wilson weaved a unique, relatable story while also keeping it grounded enough to appeal to many different types of people. I’d recommend any fan of literary fiction or magical realism get it a read.

Rating: 4.8 stars

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The Body In Question

The Body In Question is a 2019 literary fiction novel by Jill Ciment. It was published in June 2019 by Pantheon. I read it as part of a book club, along with another book. The novel tells the story of two sequestered jurors engaging in an affair during a highly-publicized murder trial. Although they agree to keep their oaths as jurors not to discuss the trial, things become complicated once deliberations begin.

The two main characters are C-2, the woman Hannah, and F-17, the man Graham. Other characters include the other jurors, who are referred to be nicknames C-2 gives them, and C-2's husband. There isn't a lot that's shared about these characters at all. F-17 is an anatomy professor who falls in love with C-2 during their affair. C-2 is a married photographer whose much older husband is dying and she begins the affair mostly to get it out of her system before she becomes a widow. She tries to insist she has no attachment to F-17, much to the evidence otherwise. The other characters are entirely one-dimensional and serve a purpose to either make the pair suspicious that they've been discovered or provide filler. No one seemed to have any motivations or personality beyond surface-level traits. The characters are basically paper cut-outs with no personality. Call me crazy, but if I'm reading a book, I need to at least feel something for the characters within.

One thing I dislike most about the story is that the focus seems to be on the wrong thing. Yes, the blurb explains that the story is about the forbidden love affair between two jurors, but Ciment made a mistake in creating the story of the trial they're jurors for. Rather than the pair be jurors for just any highly-publicized murder trial, the crime in question involves the death of a child in a fire and if the defendant, the victim's older autistic sister, set the fire on purpose. This part of the story was meant to be just the simple backdrop, the plot device bringing the two characters together, but was actually the most intriguing part of the story.

The trial, in the few scenes where the trial is actually about the crime and not C-2 waxing about details that don't really matter or her lover, presents an interesting mystery. Was the defendants confession coerced? Did her twin force her to confess? Why would she kill her brother? The mystery, sadly, takes second place to two very boring characters having a affair and being paranoid about being caught. Then, it's time for the jury to deliberate and, shocker, the two lovers are on different sides. One is the hold-out preventing a unanimous decision from being reached which only annoyed me more. Eventually, a decision is reached and the trial ends. The defendant is found guilty. Shortly after the trial, someone leaks it to the press that C-2 and F-17 were having an affair. Now, I was expecting some kind of consequences for the secret being revealed. Maybe the defendant's lawyers get her a new trial citing that one influenced the other's decision. Maybe the two jurors are held in contempt for violating the court's orders regarding how sequestration works. None of that happens. C-2's husband feels understandably betrayed, F-17 seemingly faces no consequences and the other jurors get trashed in the media at first for the verdict and later for not speaking up.

While I didn't like the plot, I can't say that this book is all bad. From a technical writing perspective alone, the book isn't bad. The writer clearly has a lot of talent and based on the reviews for her other books, this one seems to be an outlier. It's also a very short book, which works in its favor. Coming in at under 200 pages, I wasn't completely outraged at how I felt about the story when it was over. If this book had been twice as long, but with the same outcome, I'd be a lot angrier about the time I had wasted.

I honestly thought this book was a waste of time. In literature, words such as "story arc" or "journey" or "growth" get thrown around a lot. The Body In Question has none of that. The conclusion isn't really a conclusion. Nothing happens. The story goes exactly nowhere. C-2 isn't different at the end of the book. F-17 isn't. None of the events that happen after the trial make any difference or sends any kind of message to the reader. The most that happens is the jurors doing a symbolic "revote" on the verdict, but that's it. I've read books with good endings, I've read books with bad endings, but this is the first time that I've encountered a book with a pointless ending. There wasn't enough substance in this novel to justify an ending of any kind. If there was more focus on the characters, and they had actual personality, I might feel differently, but the lack of anything sticking out to me makes me feel like this book was a complete waste of time. I wasn't given enough reason to care about the jurors, their affair or anything going on, which made this book completely unremarkable. I can imagine that, in a few years, someone might ask me if I've read this book, and because its so unremarkable and unmemorable, I'll say "no" because I'll have completely forgotten about it.

Rating: 1.3 stars

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