Everything is Probably Fine- Julia London (Audio Narrator Marni Penning)

Lorna Lott is successful but not liked. She writes emails continuously to her sister that she does not send, till she sent one that left her boss, a boss she likes, at a loss about what to do with their star salesperson. Their problematic supervisor. Lorna must go through a 30 day wellness program paid for by her employer. No drowning herself in the one place she feels successful. No friends to help absorb some of the shock and fear and pain. Lorna lives alone with her dog in a small apartment on the first floor of a house divided into apartments. There’s the guy upstairs that makes loud music all the time. The older women. And the new guy with a little boy who is supposed to be a latchkey kid but keeps forgetting his key. But Lorna does not mix with her neighbors. Her dog has access to the communal back yard through a door in her apartment. This, plus the wellness program, plus the little boy brings this miserable woman toward a better place. How far she makes it is on Lorna. In the facing her need to change, Lorna she must deal with choices and mistakes that led to her misery, with her belief a particular person in her life caused worst problems, with her belief that one thing she hope to acquire will fix everything, with a traumatic childhood that she cannot get past emotionally and with other things that each of us may find familiar that cause us to be stuck.

In taking Lorna through this process, Julie London crafts a compelling and moving story of this broken woman’s past through her present. Not everything was bad, but maybe she didn’t feel she had a right to what she had that was good. London, through Lorna, introduces us to an array of rich characters. The wellness program, is a bit woo woo, perfect to display Lorna’s resistance to change. The wellness program’s characters are not well developed, allowing us only to see how Lorna reacts to this and what she chooses to do when given a chance and new opportunities to change. London does not stupidly make this a sudden epiphany, or easy, or even worthwhile at times. Even though thirty days is short, what Lorna gets done is fairly believable. There is a lot familiar to chew over in this novel. Lorna is a great character, a fundamentally decent person whose beliefs about herself keep her isolated. . The audio book was fabulously narrated by Marni Penning.