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.

What an utter delight of a book! Eleanor Oliphant had me totally immersed in her world.
Eleanor thinks her life is fine: she goes to work, spends her weekends drinking vodka & other than a once a week phone call with her mother, has little, if no, social interaction with others....but when Eleanor & Raymond (the IT guy at Eleanor's office) help an elderly man who has fallen, Eleanor's life is no longer the fine life she is used to.

Eleanor is naïve, pedantic & takes things literally. She has a childlike quality about her that is so endearing & her dealings with everyday situations makes for amusing & heart breaking reading. I defy anyone not raise a smile when she goes to "Julie's Beauty Basket", I cringed on more than occasion seeing how she was going to embarrass herself & more than once thought, "No...Eleanor please don't!!" - but invariably she did. As to Eleanor's weekly phone calls with Mummy, well what anger they invoked in me!

And how sad is Eleanor's acceptance of her loneliness:
"Most people's absence from the world would be felt on a personal level by at least a handful of people. I however, had no one.
I do not light up a room when I walk into it. No one longs to see me or hear my voice.
I do not feel sorry for myself, not in the least. These are simply statements of fact."

The truth about the trauma in Eleanor's past is long in being confirmed but as the reader is privy to Eleanor's thoughts there are teasing hints along the way & she finally finds the strength to confront her past.

Funny, touching & totally absorbing, Eleanor Oliphant is much more than fine.
In fact Eleanor Oliphant is pretty damned good :o)

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