Review: The Seven Imperfect Rules of Elvira Carr by Frances Maynard

Funny, heart-warming and ultimately triumphant, The Seven Imperfect Rules of Elvira Carr is the perfect story for anyone who doesn’t quite fit in – and for everyone who chooses not to. Elvira Carr is twenty-seven and neuro-atypical. Her father – who she suspects was in the secret service – has passed away and, after several Unfortunate Incidents growing up, she now spends most of her time at home with her overbearing mother. But when her mother has a stroke and is taken into care, Elvira is suddenly forced to look after herself or risk ending up in Sheltered Accommodation. Armed with her Seven Rules, which she puts together after online research, Elvira hopes to learn how to navigate a world that’s full of people she doesn’t understand. Not even the Seven Rules can help her, however, when she discovers that everything she thought she knew about her father was a lie, and is faced with solving a mystery she didn’t even know existed . . .

Review: This book was very different from what I was expecting, that should probably teach me not to read the synopsis beforehand! I was attracted by the guinea pigs on the cover, I'm not going to lie, and you don't have to worry, these guinea pigs do feature in the story and I loved them. This was a really interesting read and the eponymous Elvira Carr was a really interesting narrator of the story. He rules, that she makes for herself after find message boards online posted by other 'Neuro-atypical' users and I loved the way they wove in and out throughout the story. 

Elvira was an easy character to get to know. The fact that she even finds that she wants and uses these rules is obviously very endearing and seeing the world through her eyes is really quite something. Obviously we have her mother and father as characters in the book too and we know that there is something being hidden about her father, or maybe about both of her parents but we need to see if Elvira will manage to find out herself or whether she will allow others to get close enough to help her. I really enjoyed the way she interacts with all the other characters in the novel and it was interesting to see how her social interactions developed once she started using the rules. 

There are some serious issues covered in this book but because they are transported via Elvira and her rediscovery of the world once she finds herself more alone than she has veer been, none of these issues seem to turn this into an 'issues' book but are just another thing that is dealt with along the course of the storyline. I won't go into the issues but there are a couple of triggers in this book that I would look into if you know you may be triggered by something. 

The story did move quite slowly and so I found myself straying from it at some points but I read this during a readathon and so I found that setting myself time limits really helped keep me on track. The good thing was that I felt like Elvira wasn't ever made fun of or belittled by this author and I thought that said author did a really good job of having Elvira think in the very literally sense and not use any kind of sarcasm or turns of phrase, that was definitely well done. 

Overall I enjoyed the issues that were explored in this book, it did move a little slowly for my liking, and slower than the books I tend to prefer, but overall she was a likeable character and the liked the direction that this story ended up taking. This was an enjoyable read. 

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