She has a death to plan and can’t allow human kindness to stand in her way.
Eudora Honeysett is a miserable old woman who, after devoting herself to making others happy at the expense of living her own life, decides to pursue euthanasia. If I can have the choice of how I live my own life, why can’t I choose to die my own death? It’s a timely premise worth pondering, especially as her determination is steadfastly challenged by two well-meaning strangers with whom she enters into an unlikely friendship after too many years of secretive loneliness. Her new neighbor, a boisterous ten-year-old girl, and a widower who forms a threesome with them, become the center of a life that previously held no excitement or human connections. That these two take an immediate shine to Eudora is baffling, but they see her as a remarkable woman and insist on drawing her out during her four-month wait for her final chapter. The plotline is predictable and less nuanced than that of the similar novel A Man Called Ove [or Otto, as he is called in the American version.]
Here is a book I was glad to purchase for a couple of bucks as the Deal of the Day on Audible, but I’d have been disappointed if I spent a credit. I can’t decide if it would have felt less cloying had another narrator read it, but I found Nicollete McKenzie’s portrayal of the child’s voice to be too young and the curmudgeon’s voice too clichéd in its aristocratic sourpuss quotient. As a result, the ten-and-a-half-hour listen felt painfully longer. But I kept going because I was invested in these characters and wanted to know how it ended.