Completely bonkers and highly entertaining!
I read most of this book in one sitting. It is very readable, with short, laugh out loud chapters, yet still very poignant.
Oh Eleanor! Yeah, I get it, having your long-term boyfriend leave you, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, then moving back home with your mom as a 30-something is a lot to manage. So when that “too good to be true” job offer comes up I can see why you’d jump at the chance to high tail it out of town.
But, Eleanor, even you noticed that the road into town where your new teaching gig is looked an awful lot like the opening scenes of The Shining.
This absurdist tale gives us Eleanor, who self-identifies as having a flair for the dramatic even before her life turned to shit, and then drops Eleanor off in an isolated community that seems to have every horror movie trope imaginable. There’s the missing school teacher, multiple deadbolts on the cottage door, the priest who wants to cast the demon out, the creepy school kid, hazy memories of sex outside with a handsome stranger who leaves bite marks, the unexplained power factory, the steep ridge above the marshy bog, the muscle car that nearly runs you off the road, the severed hand … need I go on? I’m also starting to think the kangaroos symbolize something off-kilter.
And of course, having your body betray you and mutate, cancer, a miscarriage, a reconstructed breast sans nipple, is also a common horror movie theme.
Through it all Eleanor entertains. She drinks too much. She’s self absorbed. She tries and fails. She gives up trying and just barely goes through the motions. Her blog style writing, initially her method for managing her cancer recovery and then for trying to make sense of her surreal experience, are full of snark and rye wit.
Somehow she plods on even when things seem so unreal. And that’s what we all do, isn’t it?
Rating
The Seventeenth Line 