Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite

I’m so glad I met Margaret Eleanor Leigh. No, not in person…in her book, Everything Will Be Just Perfect! What a character she is! She couldn’t be more interesting if she had created herself for a fiction book. But Everything Will Be Just Perfect! isn’t fiction, and Margaret Eleanor Leigh is alive and well, writing books, and if I dare say it, slightly crazy. But crazy in the nicest and cleverest way when it comes to entertaining her readers.

Though she doesn’t classify the book as such, Everything Will Be Just Perfect! is a memoir about nothing being perfect, no matter how hard one tries. It’s also a humorous travel memoir, and what better way to travel from South Africa to New Zealand, from Greece to Wales than to move residences 92 times! Why would anyone move 92 times in a lifetime? Well, Margaret Eleanor Leigh and her mother, Polly, who ends up dying by the time all the moving’s done, have perfectly good reasons for doing so. And those reasons find readers sometimes appalled, occasionally surprised, often confused but always amused.

I really don’t want to tell you too much about Everything Will Be Just Perfect! because if you enjoy humour, you need to experience Margaret Eleanor Leigh’s crazy life, motivations, musings, fears and unfulfilled dreams for yourself. She spends much of that travel and moving time reading, observing people, writing about them, and submitting books to publishers. Then she watches her mail for rejection slips, gets them and moves on, because after all nothing is perfect even when Polly assures her everything will be just perfect. Leigh describes herself as a “writer without roots” who has lived in 6 countries. The result of all that moving is a wealth of information and insight and enough material for a library of books. Indeed, Margaret Eleanor Leigh has already written many books, in four different genres, including children's books. Leigh proves that for sure, “a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Everything Will Be Just Perfect! is one of best and most enjoyable reads I’ve had in 2015, thanks to Leigh’s self-deprecating humour that finds one looking back at oneself constantly and realizing how, despite the differences of our experiences, culture and colour, we are all very much like her when it comes to our perceptions of and interactions with others - with one big difference: most of us can’t laugh at ourselves as well as she does. And in being able to laugh at oneself lies the secret to surviving just about anything, even 92 moves back and forth across 3 continents! Read Everything Will Be Just Perfect! You’ll love it.