Bookworm in the City

This book is about Sophie, the self-proclaimed weirdo of the title.
I didn’t think Sophie is actually that weird, mainly she is just stuck and doesn’t quite know how to get herself moving on.
Sophie is thirty-two and stuck in a job that is not the worst job ever (she escaped that one already), but far away from her dream job. She doesn’t know what that dream job is, she just wants to be famous, and has a habit of narrating the things that happen to her as if she were the guest of a talk show.
She’s not just stuck in her career, but also in a relationship. She’s living with Ian because he is the easy option, while Chris is the one that got away. Literally: she even chased him to Australia at one point, but by the time she found him there, he was already in a relationship with someone else. Then there’s James, the man she left at the time to chase after Chris: she only informed him that she was traveling when she touched down in Sydney. By then she’d also created a stink of her finances and spent all the money she’d borrowed. She’s been paying back her debts slowly and not so-surely, and now Chris is back in town and his arrival has her all confused and interested again.
James in the meantime, started a relationship with Sophie’s sister, so now she’s still faced with him whenever there’s a family gathering.

All in all, Sophie was more a mess than she was weird to me. She’s floating through life, and accepts the crappy jobs and the crappy men as if she has no other choice, but if she put in a little bit of effort and believe in herself, she could take control and do much better on both fronts. It takes 320 pages for Sophie to come to that conclusion and that was a bit on the long side. Sophie did feel very real though, her problems and feelings are genuine, and her observations are at times sharp, dark, and funny. They reveal the person she could be if only she gave things a decent try.
The story is interrupted by letters and notifications through which you learn more about her life. It’s a concept that’s nothing new but does manage to lift the story up at times because it can feel dragged down a bit. The letters from and concerning Sophie’s sister are the most outrageous ones and confirmed what I already knew: Sophie might be lacking a bit of spirit and self-belief but she’s not the weirdest person out there.

Overall this book is solid but middle-of-the-pack, and scores an “okay” for me.
If you like your main character to be plucky with a can-do attitude, leave this book be. If you like your main character to be a bit different / an odd-ball, this will be a good read.