There are many spoilers for Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine in this review. Also there is cussing. Proceed at your own risk.
This book made me cry. Eleanor gets sad, super sad, depressed, and I know that feeling. I am that feeling. So I cried and cried and cried along with Eleanor. Between this and that BoJack Horseman episode, it’ll be hard for me to say that I’m all alone in the world. So yay, I guess, for all the other people out there that have moments when that voice in the back of your head telling you you are worthless is so loud that it’s impossible to drown it out.
So at that point, in the middle of the novel, I started to forgive it for the standard tropes earlier along — Eleanor starts off dowdy, but she gets a makeover, she gets her nails done, she buys some stylish clothes, because her life fixes itself she’s still sad and depressed and lonely and that voice is louder than ever. The love interest fails her (not that he ever even knows who she is) and the secondary love interest, the nice guy who was there all along, is still a nice guy and they don’t hook up, and all these standard chick-lit tropes are falling apart, and it quiets that little voice for a bit, in between my crying bouts for Eleanor because she is feeling sad, and so I feel sad too.
And then fuck this, in the last ten pages or so, one of the characters is revealed to be a hallucination. F-Uhhhhhhhhhhh-C-K. Every piece of goodwill squandered. I could handle one bait-and-switch (look, this is going to be a standard maekover and smile and get the guy chick-lit novel, oh nope it’s not, it’s a meditation on depressed and loneliness), but two, especially the second one being so stupid. So I’m mad at this book because what the fuck? I can’t even rate this book because the last ten pages suck whereas the earlier ones aren’t that bad. In fact, they’re pretty good. And then this. I’m going to add a few more fucks here: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
At least I still have BoJack Horseman.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman went on sale May 9, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.