Book Review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

About the Book:

When Graham Cavanaugh divorced his first wife it was to marry his girlfriend, Audra, a woman as irrepressible as she is spontaneous and fun. But, Graham learns, life with Audra can also be exhausting, constantly interrupted by chatty phone calls, picky-eater houseguests, and invitations to weddings of people he’s never met. Audra firmly believes that through the sheer force of her personality she can overcome the most socially challenging interactions, shepherding her son through awkward playdates and origami club, and even deciding to establish a friendship with Graham’s first wife, Elspeth.

Graham isn’t sure he understands why Audra longs to be friends with the woman he divorced. After all, former spouses are hard to categorize—are they enemies, old flames, or just people you know really, really well? And as Graham and Audra share dinners, holidays, and late glasses of wine with his first wife he starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did I make the right choice? Is there a right choice?

A hilarious and rueful debut novel of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami, Standard Deviation never deviates from the superb.

Published by Penguin Random House

Released April 2018

My Thoughts:

There’s something quite deflating about reading a book by an author and absolutely loving it only to end up hating the next one you read by them. Standard Deviation is Kathryn Heiny’s debut, and I am really thankful I discovered her with her latest (Early Morning Riser) because if this had been the first of hers I’d read, I wouldn’t have read her again.

It starts strong with her unique strand of humour, and I did have quite a few moments of laughing out loud. It hit a major wall for me, though, when it waded into infidelity waters. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and I wasn’t convinced of it in terms of character arc. From this point on, the main character Graham lost his zest for me as more about his history of infidelity within his previous marriage came to the fore. Audra became less quirky and more absurd, and when the story left the infidelity thread and abruptly jumped to another topic, and then to another after that, and so on, I began to wonder what this story was even about.

I can see, though, with having read Katherine’s debut and her latest, a clear path in terms of her literary talent. She has honed it over the years, clearly, so I’m definitely not abandoning her over this, but I certainly don’t recommend it, either.