3.5 stars.
Eleanor is a great character and we see the world through her single POV. At the start it's extremely extremely lonely and we get to watch her deal with her past trauma and build relationships haphazardly but successfully. By the end of the novel I was so emotionally invested in her I was desperate for her to succeed and was constantly worried that it was going to end sadly and catastrophically. Thankfully it doesn't. But it also doesn't end unrealistically in some perfect world.
Eleanor's social awkwardness, direct way of speaking, and sometimes minutes-long pondering of questions before responding is beautifully written. It's also really funny in lots of places:
If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?” or, “How would a salamander respond to this situation?” Invariably, I find the right answer.
He was staring into the middle distance, and I noticed that he had lit a cigarette and smoked almost half of it while I had been pondering. “Yes, Raymond. I will go to the pub with you for one drink,” I said, nodding. “Magic,” he said.
How they loved to wear those badges on their blazers the next day! As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.
I had forgotten about the security devices clipped onto the clothes, however, and we had quite a struggle to remove them. I had to come behind the desk, in the end, and kneel backward beside her so she could detach them using the magnetic machine fixed to the counter. We ended up laughing about it, actually.
“O” as a snail-shell spiral if they wished to, after all, and using a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters is simply good sense—it ensures that the signature is difficult to forge.
At other times it challenges the societal pressures on women from Eleanor's analytical, well-reasoned viewpoint and reflects on the nature of overwhelming loneliness:
Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering? These were, of course, rhetorical questions.
“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say”
The "twist" at the end of the book isn't a twist at all, it's completely obvious for most of the novel, but that didn't worry me.
It's a great book and I deliberated about whether it is 5 star or not. It didn't have that can't-put-down quality, but it definitely made me cry and I was incredibly emotionally invested. Some reviewers seem to think the character was incredibly implausible, but I've worked with some people with pretty similar personalities, minus the trauma and alcohol.
4.5 stars
