Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Book Title: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Author: Gail Honeyman
Purchase: Amazon
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Description from Goodreads:

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.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I absolutely adored the book Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and the character of Eleanor. I will caution: this book will be hard to get through if you don’t have an open mind. Eleanor may come off as harsh, cold, judgmental, and unbending to the untrained eye. But as with any situation or person, there is so much more beneath the surface. Similarly to the Goodreads summary, the only way to enjoy this book is to open your heart to Eleanor Oliphant.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine takes place in 2017 Glasgow, Scotland. I’m calling this out right now because the setting was irrationally difficult for me to figure out for the first 50 pages. Eleanor lives — and has been living — a quiet, tidy life. She’s been the entire accounting department of a small graphic design agency for around nine years. She doesn’t make friends easily (or, at all) and lives alone. Her only real outside contact consists of a weekly phone call with her mother; most weekends, she goes Friday night through Monday morning without interacting with another soul. She’s pretty content with this lifestyle, until a handsome musician catches her eye and she begins wondering if there might be more to life, if she might be worthy of his love.

At the beginning of the book, Eleanor comes across fairly cold, antisocial, and judgmental. Unfortunately, her mother was an abusive and extremely judgmental elitist, to put things mildly, so Eleanor never learned appropriate social skills. After a traumatic incident, Eleanor is removed from her mother’s care and bounced around foster homes and care facilities, leaving Eleanor bereft of emotional support and stability. I’ve read other reviews where readers couldn’t get past Eleanor’s initial demeanor — I promise if you approach this character with empathy, you’ll be rewarded with a beautiful story of growth. I may have shed a tear (or more…) at Eleanor’s transformation by the end of the book.

However, I get why some of these reviewers were shocked. The book is covered with quotes about how witty and laugh-out-loud funny the novel is, that Eleanor’s wit kept them laughing throughout yadda yadda. These quotes are a bit misleading and were likely intended to cushion the reality, which is a deep dive into mental wellbeing, post-traumatic stress disorder, and human connection. I found Eleanor’s narration funny, but not in a feel-good beach-read kind of way — more in a wow, that was blunt and way to add insult to injury type of way. I also found her complete commitment to honesty refreshing and appreciated such an atypical narrator.

The other issue that may have bugged other readers is that the summary kind of positions the novel as a romance. It categorically is not. The plot centers on Eleanor’s personal growth. It takes her awhile to realize she’s undeniably lonely and yearning for human connection, romantic or platonic. She develops an authentic relationship with the unkempt IT coordinator at work, Raymond Gibbons. In him, she finds her first true friend, and Raymond helps pave the way for additional relationships.

Raymond, probably — based on Eleanor’s description.

Okay, remember when I said this wasn’t a warm-and-fuzzy beach read? Yeah, we’re dealing with some heavy topics described in explicit detail. Minor spoilers ahead, so feel free to skip this paragraph. But for those who want to be prepared, this novel explores alcohol abuse and dependency, physical and emotional abuse, depression, and suicide. I thought these events were handled with brutal realism. Honeyman accurately depicted the fallout of trauma while staying true to her character. Shining light on stories like Eleanor’s helps bring discussion of mental health out in the open and, hopefully, reminds us all to be kind and compassionate toward our fellow human beings.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is not like most other books I’ve read. It’s definitively not YA, but it does share some similar themes with Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry, although the latter is solidly a YA romance. I would recommend Eleanor for anyone interested in a fresh perspective, a redemptive story of growth, or those interested in mental health and wellness. This is definitely a book I see myself rereading in the future.