CW (mentioned in the post and for the book): Child Abuse, Verbal Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Physical Abuse, Rape, Sexual Assault, Murder, Suicide, Alcoholism, Animal Abuse, Fatphobia
This book is completely fine.
I don't think I can do a post in the usual format because I really don't have much to say about this book. In a lot of ways Eleanor's relationship with her mother triggered some of my own trauma, which made it difficult for me to fully enjoy this novel. I recognize that it is good, but also wasn't able to get very invested during the first section.
So, I guess, the essential plot of the novel is this: Eleanor goes through her solitary life, having little contact with others, even her co-workers--though, she does have weekly chats with her institutionalized mother, and enjoys quite a bit of vodka. We know that Eleanor has burn scars on one side of her face, that maybe her abusive mother had something to do with it, and that Eleanor blames herself for something happening to a younger child. As the novel begins, Eleanor has fallen in love with a musician she sees at a show and decides it's time to change her life, so her first meeting with the musician will be perfect. Before that work can really begin, Eleanor and a co-worker, Raymond, save the life of an elderly man named Sammy. This incident draws Eleanor out, and she becomes closer with Raymond and with Sammy and his family. She attends several parties and goes to pubs and cafes; gets a haircut for the first time since childhood, buys fashionable clothes, and starts wearing makeup. Sort of against her will, Raymond becomes her friend. Deciding that she's ready to meet the musician, Eleanor buys tickets to his concert, but realizes while she's there that the musician is horrible and she was only infatuated. Eleanor then goes on a drinking binge with every intention to die by suicide, but Raymond comes to check on her and saves her. He encourages Eleanor to seek counseling and their friendship deepens. She does go to therapy and it makes a drastic impact on her life. Eleanor recovers memories of her younger sister, Marianne, and that their mother set a fire intentionally to kill them, but Eleanor survived. Eleanor decides to stop speaking to her mother, and then we learn that Eleanor's mother died in the fire she set to kill her children. The phone conversations were all in Eleanor's head. This realization frees Eleanor, and presumably she will go on to living a happier life.
What I Liked:
I enjoyed Eleanor. Her conceptions of niceness do not align to society's and I found her an enjoyable character. I was invested in her life and her happiness.
Raymond is also good. He's just an average dude who Eleanor was conditioned by her mother to think of as terrible. He's kind and makes an effort to know Eleanor who doesn't really want to be known.
I love Sammy and his red sweater. I love that after Sammy dies, one of his sons brings the red sweater to Eleanor because she liked it so much.
I love Glen the cat. I'm glad that Eleanor got a cat, the perfect pet for her, and that they bring each other joy and comfort. It was a little too on-the-nose that the cat had also been abused and burned, but everything else about Glen worked so well that I don't mind.
I was worried, at the beginning, that some of this book would be about humiliating Eleanor for being different ( I don't know why I had that fear; I don't think he text lends itself to this reading), and I was so relieved that that's not what this book is about.
What I disliked:
In this book, space is devoted to Eleanor learning societal expectations of women, as far as beauty and appearance goes. She makes many statements that I believe are supposed to be profound, or at least a lot of people found them to be judging by the underlines in the Kindle edition. And maybe it's because this book came out in 2017 and it's 2021, but now they don't read as deep revelations. Like, yeah, femininity (and gender!) is performative?? I imagine people reading these passages with their index fingers gently pressed to their chins, nodding and staring contemplatively into the middle-distance.
There is so much upsetting fatphobia in this book. We get a reason, Eleanor learned it from her mother, and I hated every second of it. Fat bodies are gross, fat people waddle, no one wants to sit next to the fattie on the train. It's bad. Eventually, Eleanor recognizes that feeling this way about fat people is wrong and that maybe she needs to adjust her attitude. She lists a lot of reasons that someone could be fat but doesn't recognize that...sometimes people just have fat bodies? It's all connected to something being wrong with the fat person, not with Eleanor's thinking still being wrong. Anyway, so many other things could have been used to illustrate the horrid ideas about the world/people Eleanor's mother instilled in Eleanor, probably to better result! And it sucks that it's fat people! It comes out of nowhere each time and is jarring and awful!
The revelation that Eleanor's mother has been dead the whole time is positioned as a sort of last minute twist to the narrative, and I didn't love it. I think the fact that Eleanor was imagining these conversations as part of her trauma is a powerful part of the story, and I hate the way it's revealed. Using it as a twist really diminishes and cheapens something that should make a profound impact on Eleanor and readers. This book didn't need a twist.
Verdict: Ultimately, I enjoyed the overall arc of the story. It's actually quite heartwarming, by the end. But also, I think I had some genuine terror that she'd actually talk to that musician--whose terribleness is obvious to everyone aside from Eleanor based on her lack of social contact--and the fear of that humiliation had me on edge in the bad way. The resolution of that portion of the narrative is upsetting in a different way, but ends up leading Eleanor towards healing and hope, which I found beautiful.
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