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Reviewed by Romuald Dzemo for Readers' Favorite
Elizabeth Diane Adams' Fully Average is the story of Melissa Jolene Bonetti, who, in spite of her constant sense of dread, considers herself lucky. She has a long-term boyfriend and a steady accounting job, but her life implodes spectacularly when she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her and uncovers corporate fraud at work on the same day. Now she loses both a boyfriend and a job in which she has invested a lot. She is depressed as she goes back into her childhood bedroom and experiences depression. One thing is most disturbing to her: the perfect life of Rachel Moore, the same girl who bullied and tormented her in middle school. She is determined to prove that Rachel is a fraud, which leads her on a dangerous path that moves from one mistake to another as she breaks laws, is alienated from her supportive mother, and hits rock bottom with an arrest.
Elizabeth Diane Adams is a great storyteller; her characters are real, and the story is plausible. Characterization is stellar in this novel, and the depiction of Melissa as a woman who considers herself “fully average,” down to her brown eyes, height, and brown hair, masks her underlying fragility and trauma from bullying. The supporting characters are equally complex, and I enjoyed how Rachel Moore becomes a mirror through which Melissa can measure her resentment. The worldbuilding in Fully Average is superb, saturated with millennial pop culture. References to films like Office Space and Mean Girls, and true crime podcasts, ground the novel in recognizable, specific reality. This book ingeniously examines the fallacy of karmic justice, mental health challenges, and the thread of female solidarity that moves the story briskly through exciting catastrophes.
