BOOK REVIEW | AMAZING GRACE ADAMS – FRAN LITTLEWOOD

The blurb for this book grabbed my attention, because I really loved Ove. I read A Man Called Ove last year and it was one of my favourite books. I even liked the film. Eleanor Oliphant was less of a hit, but more because I took issue with some of the author’s decisions around how to portray her than through any fault of her own. Bernadette and I got along so poorly I never finished her book. So I felt like this one could go either way, but if done properly had the potential to be a huge success.

Grace Adams is not having a good day. She started it off stuck in traffic, and ended it… much worse. But between the beginning and end of the day we are filled in on every step of her day, but also every salient detail of her life that led to the particular situation she currently finds herself in. I will give Grace one thing: She does know how to fall apart in spectacular fashion. Really. She does us all proud.

But I digress. So we meet Grace, and flit back and forth between her current day, her distant past, and her more recent past. We learn why she’s trying to get to her daughter’s birthday party, but not at her own house. We learn what happened to her marriage. We learn about her career trajectory (high highs to…nonexistent). We learn about her peri-menopause and the havoc it’s wreaking with her body and mind (seriously, can I just skip mine? Cos it does not sound like a good time). There’s so much in this story, and so much for us to catch up on.

Suffice it to say, without spoilers, Grace has been through some shit. Pretty much in every area of her life, there’s been tragedy and hardship. It’s amazing she’s still standing, but somehow she is. Her story is one that evokes sympathy and you can’t help but feeling gutted as you learn some of the things she’s had to survive. The odd thing about this book, though, is that as much as her story is deeply emotional, I felt oddly removed from it. The story is sympathetic, and Grace should be too… but somehow she’s just not. Maybe it’s the grim detail she shares, or the extremity of the poor decisions she makes, or how she treats the people around her. I’m not sure what it is, but I just couldn’t get on her wavelength. I tried, I wanted to, but I just couldn’t feel like I was connected to her even as I walked through her horrible memories with her. There were weird disconnected details that were thrown in ostensibly to add a quirky angle, but they just felt misplaced. And the way she behaves towards the people in her life is… odd. I get she’s dealing with trauma and that can manifest in numbness, but as it was described I just didn’t feel that from her. Everyone in the story was a bit off kilter and didn’t quite coalesce into characters I could fully see come to life. They each seemed to have different aspects, as we all do, but they weren’t adequately explored or tied together, so the characters just felt like they weren’t quite put together right.

It’s hard to put into words exactly what didn’t work about this book for me, because it should have. I loved Grace’s middle fingers up attitude, I loved her early adventures, but there were these whole other parts of her that just clashed. She’s falling apart, but there’s so much detail about how she’s falling apart that there’s no chance to really feel it – it’s all clinical description of her doing crazy stuff that seems cold and disconnected, which in turn makes Grace seem cold and disconnected.

It wasn’t a bad book. I’m glad I read it. I’m glad I got to know Grace. I like books that feature women who have been through motherhood and loss and pain and are – in whatever way – working to deal with it and move on. This book did have all of that. It will probably be a wonderful point of recognition for a lot of women who read it, and I think it’s so important to have books featuring people – women – who don’t have it all together and who are allowed to be messy. The story did draw me through it, and I did want to find out what happened at the end. I was glad I stuck with it, and I could see how close this book was to being one I could feel myself in. So, so close!

I’d love to hear from anyone else who read this book, because I feel like I’m just missing something vital here. It had all the right ingredients, but it just didn’t come together. Which is a shame, because Grace had so much potential!

Bernadette , Eleanor Oliphant, Rosie, Ove . . . meet Amazing Grace Adams , the funny, touching, unforgettable story of an invisible everywoman pushed to the brink―who finally pushes back.

Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled―the unhappiest age you can be, according to The Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away.
Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them . . . and, most important, remind herself. – Goodreads