“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 a book.. I am not sure how I feel about this..even months after reading it. It is sad and funny at times. Eleanor Oliphant forces you to look inside yourself and to truly think about how you may treat other people. Or how people who may be “different” actually feel. It reiterates the fact that we never really know what someone is battling on the inside. We should be more kind to the people that we encounter in our lives. That being said… Eleanor, the main character…annoyed me to no end at several points in the novel. I literally felt second hand embarrassment for her. Sometimes it felt as though her rudeness was absolutely inexcusable. If you are looking for an easy read that makes you think a bit with a quirky main character, this is a book for you.
GoodReads rating: 4.3
Page Count: 372
Casey Joshi 