A funny, strong, and impressive book

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.
Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.
One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.
Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

Ahh, Eleanor, what happened to you? She is lonely, the oddball at work and in the weekend she eats pizza and drinks vodka alone until Monday comes around. She upholds a rigorous routine and her life is sort of empty. The character feels very real so I am curious to find out how she will develop throughout the book!

While the musician is what motivates her physical transformation, her relationship with Raymond, the IT guy at her office, is the catalyst for an inner transformation. Their relationship is platonic, but at times veers slightly into romantic territory.

Eleanor’s lack of knowledge of social norms makes her an unreliable narrator, so it’s hard to know exactly where her relationship with Raymond lies. The reader has to sift between the words for what really may be going on. The question of will they or won’t they presents another tantalizing nugget that propels the reader forward.

In the vein of Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh — an eerily similar work about an eerily similar character with an eerily similar name — the book makes you question your worldview. If you strip away social norms, what ultimate truth lies beneath?

And while Eleanor certainly isn’t completely fine and has more than a few things to learn about the world, there’s a lot the world could learn from Eleanor, too.