Audiobook Review : Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine
Written By: amodini
-
Feb•
08•23
Title : Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Author : Gail Honeyman
Narrators : Cathleen McCarron
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Listening Length : 11 hours 2 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
I started reading this book sometime ago, but it just couldn’t hold interest. It had seemed right up my alley, so I decided to give it another chance as an audiobook. As it turns out the book was quite entertaining, especially with the fabulous narration.
Eleanor Oliphant is a single woman who lives a lonely, almost regimental life with a fixed schedule. There is vodka on the weekends and unnerving calls with mommy on weekdays. She does not have any friends and is considered odd and eccentric by her workmates.
“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.”
One day, she meets the IT guy Raymond Gibbons at her workplace when she needs help with her computer. She does not form a high opinion of him, but he is friendly and when by chance, they both get embroiled in a situation outside work, Eleanor gets to know him better.
This book is told in the first person, so we really get to hear from Eleanor! She’s an interesting person if a little quirky. There is a tragic side to her life which we are introduced to a little by little, the reason why Eleanor is the way she is. There are scars on her face and the calls with mommy aren’t the comforting familial chats you would expect with a mother.
I quite liked Eleanor’s character, and felt a lot of sympathy for her. Her normalcy, and ideas of the ordinary are on a different plane. She speaks her mind, but given that her social niceties aren’t quite on par, her actions are sometimes viewed as rude.
“No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m afraid I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.”
Despite the raw hand that has been dealt her, Eleanor means no harm, and we become quite invested in her story. Her attempts to learn and grow and to try new things are endearing. Sometimes these result in misunderstandings and hilarity like her visit to the waxing salon – so there is humor along with the suspense!
It is heartwarming to see Eleanor’s evolution and growth. It is a long journey, but we hope that Eleanor will be fine. And that is reward enough.
This lovely, feel-good book poignantly highlights the basic goodness of people. I highly recommend it, especially in audio form. Narrator Cathleen McCarran is wonderful, and she manages to bring out Eleanor’s quirky personality.
Audiobook Review : Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center
Written By: amodini
-
Dec•
14•22
Title : Things You Save In a Fire
Author : Katherine Center
Narrators : Therese Plummer
Genre : Romance
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Listening Length : 10 hours 26 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Cassie has been brought up by her father, since the age of 16. Her mother left them both when she fell in love with another man. Cassie remembers the betrayal vividly – it was her 16th birthday – and cannot forgive her mother. Her mother though wants a reconciliation, and when she needs help around the house because of a problem with her eyes, Cassie’s father (on speaking terms with the mom) persuades her to go. It is only for a year, he says. Although Cassie is determined to not go, a kerfuffle at her workplace prompts a transfer to a Boston firehouse and she then starts work near her mother’s home.
Cassie is a strong, determined and brave young woman. She is one of two female firefighters in her firehouse in Austin, Texas, and loves the supportive environment and the easy camaraderie at work. A move to the new firehouse with an all male conservative minded crew is a difficult transition, but Cassie is determined to make it work. She of course does not anticipate a hidden antagonist in the seemingly friendly new co-workers who is trying his best to sabotage her career.
If you’ve read “How To Walk Away” you will recall that Cassie was the firefighter who rescued Margaret Jacobsen, the protagonist of that novel. This book has Cassie as the heroine of her own romance. And what a heroine she is!
Author Katherine Center with her skilled prose manages to create a grit-filled, graceful character in Cassie. Like all Center’s heroines Cassie must make the best of a bad situation, overcome roadblocks and learn to forgive. The romance is also nicely fleshed out, and we root for Cassie’s happiness.
Therese Plummer’s lovely narration adds charm to this enjoyable romance!
Audiobook Review : Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
Written By: amodini
-
Nov•
16•22
Title : Apples Never Fall
Author : Liane Moriarty
Narrators : Caroline Lee
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Listening Length : 18 hours 3 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
I’ve been a fan of Moriarty’s writing ever since I listened to The Husband’s Secret. So I anticipated a good read/listen when I started Apples Never Fall. And while not quite as spectacular as Husband’s Secret or even Big Little Lies (another great book), Apples Never Fall is a decent listen.
The Delaney family is one of tennis players. Parents Joy and Stan have run the Delaney Tennis Academy for many years and have recently sold it to live a life of leisurely retirement. Their four adult children Amy, Logan, Troy and Brooke used to play tennis but have now given it up to follow other professional aspirations. The family is close, but when Joy disappears, suspicion falls on Stan; a betrayal in the marriage has recently come to light. Then there is also beautiful, young Savannah who came to stay for a night at Joy and Stan’s and stayed on.
Moriarty’s writing is, as always, impressive, teasing out fine character details effortlessly. She has this knack of describing her characters where it’s all showing and no telling – the characters build beautifully through different points of view, conversations and incidents. While all the Delaney’s are written very well, Joy stood out for me.
The story builds though current incidents and past reminiscences. The initial build-up is good, and the novel trundles along taking you with it. The underwhelming ending though left a little to be desired. Also the plot, the raison d’etre for the novel was a little shaky, a lot of something out of nothing, and a bit of a stretch honestly.
Apples Never Fall is not a pot-boiler – Moriarty’s books never are. They are graceful, elegantly constructed stories about relationships, and offer plenty of unexpected twists and turns and solid surprises. This book though was different – there was one big mystery (Joy’s disappearance ) and it resolves rather tepidly, none of the Moriarty-esque fireworks here.
While the book itself is a decent read, it was made so much more enjoyable by narrator Caroline Lee’s reading. The authentic Aussie accent, the different intonations for each character helped bring out their personalities. Lee has also narrated The Husband’s Secret and Nine Perfect Strangers.
Audiobook Review : How To Walk Away by Katherine Center
Written By: amodini
-
Oct•
19•22
Title : How To Walk Away
Author : Katherine Center
Narrators : Therese Plummer
Genre : Romance
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Listening Length : 11 hours 28 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Margaret Jacobsen has everything she could have ever wished for – a great new job and a fiancé she is so in love with. Chip, her handsome fiancé is on the brink of proposing. Margaret knows it, and she is so ready! But just when things are finally happening, everything turns around on its head – all that Margaret is looking forward to is cruelly taken away.
In the hospital, Margaret has to swallow the cold, hard truth, and is overwhelmed by how cruelly her life has turned upside down. She can wallow in self-pity or she can move on, and her sister Kit and physical therapist Ian won’t let her give up. Chip, of course, is another matter.
I like Katherine Center’s books (I read Everyone is Beautiful a while ago) – they are well-written novels which give you lots of story and a well-embedded romance. She writes the female point-of-view very well and it helps that her feisty heroines are on the cusp of a great change, an awakening with which they soundly change the course of their lives.
I enjoyed How To Walk Away even though the hero was a bit stereotyped – gruff exterior with heart of gold etc. This was an entertaining read, with characters I could root for. Also a fun detail I noticed was that her novels link characters together – the female firefighter Cassie who makes an appearance in this book has a whole other novel dedicated to her – Things You Save in a Fire – which I listened to a little while after listening to this one. Review for that one coming soon!
Narrator Therese Plummer is fantastic – she brought Margaret to life!
Book Review : Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Written By: amodini
-
Sep•
21•22
Title : Project Hail Mary
Author : Andy Weir
Genre : Science fiction
Publisher : Penguin
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Andy Weir’s first book The Martian is one of my favorite books of all time. I loved the book and I loved the film that was based on the book. Well, after that Weir wrote Artemis, which I tried reading but had to drop because I found it juvenile. So, I didn’t have too much hope for Project Hail Mary but Weir surprises me again – I loved Project Hail Mary.
In Project Hail Mary, our protagonist is stuck by himself (well, almost) in space on a spaceship, and it’s not even familiar space – no planets, no earth, it’s not even our solar system. He’s alone, has apparently woken up from a cryogenic sleep, doesn’t remember who he is or what he’s doing on the ship.
Well, little by little, memory returns. The ship’s computer helps in research and our protagonist is able to piece together the story. Turns out there is a life and death situation back on earth – the sun is in grave danger of dimming. Not by a lot; just enough to kill all life on earth, and this spaceship and this desperate foray out of our solar system is a last ditch effort by all the people on earth (all space agencies and governments have come together) to find a way to reverse this phenomenon.
While on this journey, our hero, Ryland Grace, comes across an alien ship, and happens to communicate and meet with the alien. Turns out the alien is also on a similar mission – the dimming of the sun is affecting his planet too. Given the same goal, will the two be able to find a way to save all life as we know it?
Project Hail Mary is kind of a solitary tale, like The Martian. There’s the human and the alien in all of deep, vast space. Weir is strongest here, describing their interactions, because the two look very unalike, and communicate in very different ways. Still, they form a bond and a friendship and Weir builds it up beautifully and dramatically.
We get the human, of course, because he is one of us, but Weir manages to imbue the alien, as different as he is from us, with very humanlike characteristics – humor, anger, worry, consternation. We root for him too, and that’s the beauty of the novel – getting us invested in not one but two “people”, one of whom is an alien as different from us as we can imagine.
Project Hail Mary is a lovely book! Highly recommended.
Audiobook Review : The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Written By: amodini
-
Aug•
24•22
Title : Age Of Innocence
Author : Edith Wharton
Narrators : Barbara Caruso
Genre : Historical
Publisher : Recorded Books
Listening Length : 11 hours 47 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️ 1/2
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2
The Age Of Innocence is set in the early 1920s and is about a love forbidden by society’s strict dictates of that time. While it starts off well, it grew tiresome and stretched towards the end.
Newland Archer, heir of one of New York society’s top families, is about to marry May Welland, daughter of the illustrious Mingott family. Newland is very much in love with May and is looking forward to a happy married life with the pretty and agreeable May. However when May’s worldly cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, makes an appearance, Newland’s love for his fiancee is tested.
The Age of Innocence is a commentary on society’s rules and morality. In this book, the New York of the early 1900s is dominated by old money, the set of reputed families that live around 5th Avenue, who hold up the double standards and pretension. These families also keep in place the strict rules for “good” women – staid, honorable and married. The men don’t have to keep to such high standards, and the book tells of many male characters who engage in affairs outside of their marriages:
…When “such things happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.
So when the married Countess Olenska wants a divorce from her abusive husband, societ is aghast. Separation is acceptable, but divorce is not. For per society, it s far better to be a separated Countess (the title comes from her marriage to a Polish Count) than a divorced old maid. The Countess though is determined to not go back to her husband, is stifled by all the doublespeak, and openly flouts society’s rules. She seems lonely but puts it to Newland, just so:
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Newland is called in to help persuade Ellen, and is impressed by her resolve and unpretentious nature. She also helps him question the hypocrisy and the false values with which he has been raised. He is drawn to the Countess’s maturity and intelligence, her ability to counter and question. She is quite the reverse of placid May in that respect, and Newland begins to realize that the marriage he has been so eagerly anticipating will not be the lively, meeting-of-the-minds he thinks it will be.
His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.
Newland and Ellen fall in love, but he is to be married shortly and she is an already married woman. Given the strong sense of duty they both harbor, they cannot possibly find happiness together, can they?
I’m impressed that Edith Wharton displays sensibilities so far ahead of her time. Via Newland, she calls out society’s double standards, and questions the so-called morality and honor it attempts to enforce. Honestly, 1920’s American society reminds me very much of present-day Indian society where a woman’s goal in life is touted as “to get married and stay married”, and women and men indulging in similar behavior are judged very differently from each other.
The feminist and egalatarian angle is great. The story though, got repetitive with all the harping on about Newland’s and Ellen’s great love and regard for each other. Newland is a respectable young man, betrothed to a very suitable young woman, so outwardly, he tries to preserve decorum. And we go back and forth between his and Ellen’s meetings and conversations where he beseeches her to go away with him, and she demurs. Well then, she almost agrees, and then she doesn’t, and so on. This got kinda tiresome after a while. Also the language is long-winded – this was the unabridged version.
So, I can’t really recommend The Age Of Innocence; I finished it by sheer force of will. Narrator Barbara Caruso is great, and brings that “old-worldliness” to her narration.
Audiobook Review : Clockdance by Anne Tyler
Written By: amodini
-
Jul•
27•22
Title : Clockdance
Author : Anne Tyler
Narrators : Kimberly Farr
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Random House Audio
Listening Length : 9 hours 12 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Well, I listened to this book and have been contemplating on whether I should review this book or not. I mean, it’s not a bad book, but it’s not a great one either. I had had high hopes from it, given that it’s authored by Anne Tyler, who’s written lovely ones like “Redhead by the Side of the Road”. Clockdance is kinda meh, nice enough, but so slow in it’s telling.
Willa Drake has had a bit of a rocky childhood – the progeny of a mild-mannered man and a histrionic woman who’s given to disappearing and re-appearing in their lives . As a young woman, Willa leaves college to go marry her first husband Derek. At 61, Willa has been widowed once, but is now married to Peter, a semi-retired attorney.
While her life is comfortable, Willa is a bit at loose ends. So when, a call comes from Baltimore asking Willa to come care for her grand-daughter because she temporarily needs an adult guardian, she gets on a flight (and Peter goes with her) and flies to Baltimore even though she doesn’t actually have a grand-daughter. She knows 9 year old Cheryl (the “grand-daughter”), and her mother Denise by the most tenuous of mistaken connections, but now that she is in Baltimore Willa decides to stay and help out.
When Peter deems that they should leave after a few days, ordinarily pliable Willa demurs – a rare rebellion for her. Peter leaves, but Willa stays, her days and her life becoming more and more intertwined with Cheryl and Denise’s. She know that the time will come when she actually has to go home to Peter, but for now she is needed here.
Clockdance, like Ladder of Years has a female protagonist, who’s searching for something besides the obvious, a sense of self, a sense of purpose perhaps? Early on in this book, an elderly character remarks about the need to find something to live for, and Willa’s story ties into that theme.
Tyler’s books have protagonists (male or female) with a problem. It’s not a material problem; it is generally not money or the rent. It is a hard-to-describe problem, this hunt for the self, a search for affection, the struggle to not get trodden upon. But describe it she does and how! In this book there are no bombastic events, no great big rushes of emotion. Ther are placid goings and comings, we hear people talk, narrate events, and feel. And we feel with them. Tyler has that great wonderful skill of subtly embedding emotion and nuance into her stories.
This is why I recommend Anne Tyler and can’t stop reading her. Yes, Clockdance with it’s large stretches of seeming nothingness and short, sporadic bursts of activity (I’d have preferred the reverse), is a relative disappointment, but it still showcases a master at her craft.
Narrator Kimberly Farr is absolutely marvelous and voiced Willa so perfectly! She has a lovely pleasant voice and great pitch and tone. I would definitley pick up a book with her narration again!
