Everyone has issues, some people more so than others. This is the story of a woman who doesn’t know the unspoken rules. She has this world, inside her head and she has happily existed there for most of her life. Should she change? Why should she change?
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Meet Eleanor Oliphant. She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully time-tabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
Then 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.
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A well thought out book written about a delicate condition with extreme consideration. After a long time have I come across a book that moved me. It shows the scars that childhood has left behind in a new light. People are not just weird, they could be suffering.
A funny, quirky story which is extremely sad. The book keeps giving us hints about Eleanor’s suffering, never disclosing the full extent of what happened to her and how it has impacted her entire life. Eleanor’s quest to find love and human touch, only to be disappointed, her belief that she doesn’t deserve anything good in life, her drowning in a vicious circle of vodka and dread, ready to let herself go — makes the overall mood of this book an eternally sad one.
Now, let’s talk about her character development. What starts out as a confused, slightly disillusioned, lonely young woman, matures into a caring, loving and loved person. Eleanor is the best character I have come across this year. She is witty, funny, realistic and simply adorable, once people get to know her. All she needed was someone to care for her, make her believe she mattered.
This book also serves a harsh dose of reality. How many times have we written off people or singled them out because there was something different/ not normal about them. Does it not make us prejudiced? It also shows us how far a simple gesture of kindness goes.
In the end, I will just say, I am in love with this book. My favourite from 2017 and a must read for everyone!
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