I am usually fairly good at spotting books I’m just not going to like without reading them, but I try to keep an open mind. Sometimes I am surprised if I do read one, as I was when I read Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Sometimes I am not.
Nora Seed’s life started out with a lot of promise, but for one reason or other she quit doing all the things she’s good at. Haig begins with a countdown of days and hours before she decides to commit suicide. Having taken an overdose, she ends up in a library of all the lives she could have had, free to try some of them out.
I kept my patience and read through the first alternative life, about a quarter of the book. Then I quit.
Why didn’t I like it? Let me count the ways:
- The horrible sprightly tone with which it discusses a character who is so miserable she is suicidal
- The choppy rhythm of its writing. Almost every sentence begins subject verb subject verb, more like a children’s book than an adults’.
- The lack of character depth, or really any personality at all
- The lack of any kind of depth or subtlety
- The confused and poorly thought out working of the library
- Pretty much everything else about the book
What? Me Read? 