Rebecca Hardiman
March 2, 2021
Atria Books
Blurb: When Kevin Gogarty’s irrepressible eighty-three-year-old mother, Millie, is caught shoplifting yet again, he has no choice but to hire a caretaker to keep an eye on her. Kevin, recently unemployed, is already at his wits’ end tending to a full house while his wife travels to exotic locales for work, leaving him solo with his sulky, misbehaved teenaged daughter, Aideen, whose troubles escalate when she befriends the campus rebel at her new boarding school.
Into the Gogarty fray steps Sylvia, Millie’s upbeat home aide, who appears at first to be their saving grace—until she catapults the Gogarty clan into their greatest crisis yet.
With charm, humor, and pathos to spare, Good Eggs is a delightful study in self-determination; the notion that it’s never too late to start living; and the unique redemption that family, despite its maddening flaws, can offer.
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Good Eggs by Rebecca Hardiman is a whirlwind of a novel told through three very disparate POVs: octogenarian, Millie, her middle-aged son Kevin, and seemingly troubled granddaughter Aideen. After shoplifting for not the first time from the local grocer, Millie is brought into the police station. Considering her car accidents and now this, Kevin employs a companion for his mother, an American woman named Sylvia who is upbeat and seems to be just the person Millie needs. Sylvia has a teenage nephew, Sean, who might just be the person Aideen needs.
I think Hardiman did an amazing job of bringing these three different POVs to life. Millie is shrewd, feisty, and sometimes prickly. Kevin is frequently a dolt and self-absorbed. Aideen is impetuous but has a good heart, and I loved the limericks she writes throughout the novel.
The family sequences in some ways reminded me of the sometimes over-the-top humor from the Derry Girls, frenetic and funny. To even these out, there was sensitive introspection and revisiting of the past, with granddaughter learning things about her grandmother that she never knew, that gave her a fresh perspective.
While Good Eggs might not be everyone’s cuppa, I enjoyed this frequently funny, irreverent romp of a novel.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
rating:
4 out of 5 butterflies