Redhead Rage Reads
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: A review
“Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.” pg.238
Review in 10 words:
A blunt story without the need of a clean ending.
To be consumed as follows:
Read this book with a crisp cider. I would recommend Tilse’s Apple Cider enjoyed either in a park or a cozy chair. It needs to be with ice, of course. Eleanor would prefer you use a coaster. Crocheted blanket optional. Beats: The Pride and Prejudice Soundtrack.
Synopsis:
Taken from Goodreads
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive – but not how to live.
Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.
Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.
One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.
Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?
My Thoughts:
I had had my eye on reading this novel for a while, and I am so glad I did. I have been deep into a fantasy dive and this was a breath of fresh air.
From the outset Eleanor presents as an intriguing character. The first few chapters subtly install you in her world and the complexities that are within it. What I initially identified as a suprising representation of social awkwardness soon became a convincing and endearing heroine. The story is set in one of my favourite places; Glasgow. The nuanced references to life in Scotland (even just trips to Tesco) were nostalgic of travels there.
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Eleanor is everything we wish we were brave enough to be and to say. This book takes the idea of trauma and gives it a new face. The rawness of Eleanor’s undoing and her painful growth was only possible through the kindness of those around her. Ironically, these are same people she identifies as nuisances at best. Her friendship with Raymond was refreshing and I loved seeing a new adult friendships form. In so many stories these long established friendships are presented and I appreciated this booked touched on the awkwardness of making friends well past your teen years.
Superficially, it weaved a story of a woman, dealing with trauma and pursuing a crush. Ultimately it is a deep dive into what it is to choose to grow and to become what you want - and not want everyone needs. I think as a woman in her twenty's I am not alone in experiencing the fear of thinking it is too late to change something about yourself, and Eleanor is the unlikely heroine that makes that voice a little quieter.
"Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?"
p. 85
"I wondered if that’s what it would be like in a family – if you had parents, or a sister, say, who would be there, no matter what. It wasn’t that you could take them for granted, as such – heaven knows, nothing can be taken for granted in this life – it was simply that you would know, almost unthinkingly, that they’d be there if you needed them, no matter how bad things got."
pg. 281
"Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it."
pg. 235
"But it didn’t hurt – like noticing you had a stone in your shoe, but while you were sitting down rather than walking on it."
pg. 240
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Have you read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine?
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What it taught me:
I think I connected so strongly with this book and the concept that humans find safety in sameness. Having recently moved to a new country I found myself comforted by the monotony of Eleanor’s life and recognised the protectiveness of it. But we don’t grow in the same, we grow in the change.
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