by Rebecca Hardiman ★★★☆☆
After my book club struggled through the depressing A Tale for the Time Being, we decided we needed something lighter to follow. A 30 second Google search on "feel good books" by one of our members turned up Good Eggs, and we decided to give it a try.
Good Eggs is set in modern-day Ireland and focuses on the Gogarty family. The story is concentrated around three members, each of whom is struggling in their own unique way: matriarch and widower Millie Gogarty, whose penchant for shoplifting small things for reasons she doesn't even know has her in hot water with the police and her stepson; Kevin Gogarty, the aforementioned stepson who has lost his job and has assumed the role of stay-at-home parent while his wife becomes the primary breadwinner for the family; and Kevin's daughter Aideen, who struggles in the shadow of her twin sister and her parents' unilateral decision to send her to boarding school.
Millie is a mischievous grandmother who is struggling to find purpose in life. Whether it's her shoplifting, or her calls to Kevin to help with mundane household tasks like changing the batteries in the remote, Millie is consistently (and unconsciously) looking for ways to avoid being irrelevant in the lives of those she loves. As she begins to struggle with some bits of getting older, such as driving, her greatest fear becomes that Kevin will put her in a home to spend the rest of her days among her contemporaries, but those that are far less capable and healthy than she.
Kevin, meanwhile, is struggling since the loss of his job. Caring for his mother, her idiosyncrasies, and what he perceives simply as neediness is taking a toll. He feels a diminished self-worth while trying (and in his mind, failing) to manage his household of children. His challenges finding a job and dealing with his family leave him feeling emasculated.
Lastly, Aideen is struggling to feel validated as her own unique person. Being a twin has left her being compared to her sister Nuala for her entire life, and while Nuala has boys calling her daily and is popular and successful, Aideen retreats into herself, writing limericks and listening to remakes of 80's soft rock music while waiting for some boy, any boy, to call. When she discovers her parents have decided to send her to boarding school without ever consulting her, she hits rock bottom.
For a "feel good book", that's an awful lot of struggle, isn't it? While their individual challenges are different on the surface, there's is an underlying theme of each character at a place in their lives where they trying to find purpose while remaining true to themselves. Whether it is Millie adrift following the death of her husband, Kevin floundering without his job or meaningful prospects for a new one, or Aideen lost in her sister's shadow and cast away by her parents to boarding school, each tries to get back on solid footing in their own way.
It's against this overarching theme that the events of the story take place. And while the events contribute to each characters' journey toward fixing what feels broken in their lives, they ultimately are secondary to what is essentially a character study. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly great one. For all of the time spent developing the characters, I hate to say that I didn't especially like any of them, at least not to the point where I'd want to spend any additional time with them. The level of growth for each was relatively minimal and for me pretty disappointing. While there are some light-hearted moments, I wouldn't classify this as a "feel-good book", and while not depressing, it wasn't as uplifting as perhaps I was expecting it to be.
Overall, there's nothing especially wrong with Good Eggs, but there's also nothing especially right. You can skip this one.
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