Good Eggs by Rebecca Hardiman

 

Title:  Good Eggs

Author: Rebecca Hardiman

Read by:  Alana Kerr Collins, Gary Furlong, and Siobhan Waring

Publisher: Simon & Shuster Audio

Length: Approximately 10 hours and 17 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Shuster Audio.  Thank-you! 

 Good Eggs is the story of the three generational Irish Gogarty family.  Eighty-three-year-old Millie likes to shop lift and is beginning to show signs of dementia.  Her son, Kevin, decides to get a home aide, Sylvia, to help her out.  Kevin has lost his job, and is trying to deal with his mother, and his daughters.  When one sixteen-year-old daughter, Aideen, causes trouble, Kevin ships her off to boarding school where she promptly integrates herself with the number one troublemaker in the school.  When the family finds themselves in a crisis, how will they recoup?

Good Eggs was a mixed read for me.  On the positive, I loved that audiobook was set up with three narrators to tell the story as told through the three different viewpoints in the book.  Their Irish accents and narration were excellent.  It was a great audiobook experience.  I also really loved the character of Millie.  She cracked me up and was a fun character.  I wanted the story just to be about her!  On the negative side, I really didn’t like the character of Kevin.  He complains about his wife not spending time with him when she is working hard to support their family while he is out of a job.  Instead of working harder to find a new job and alleviate her workload, he instead decides to try to embark on an affair.  I was not pleased and could not sympathize with him at all.  It really brought the book down for me.  The book was advertised as being very funny.  I did like the humor, but it wasn’t laugh out loud funny and had a lot of down moments in it.

Overall, Good Eggs is an interesting book about a multi-generational Irish family.  The audiobook experience is excellent, but the story was so-so for me.