A review by tatterededges
Any Ordinary Day: What Happens After the Worst Day of Your Life? by Leigh Sales

3.0

I was keen to read this book from the moment I first heard about it. Sales manages to take a really interesting and rich subject matter and make it so bland that I often found my attention waning. Instead of focusing on the human interest, she feels the need to water it all down with statistics and probability.

Stuart Diver tells her he’s secretly worried that he’ll be alone forever because nobody will want to be the 3rd Mrs Diver and Sales response is to waffle on for 15minutes on the probability that his next wife will die before him.

In researching and putting together the book, she spent hours talking to a plethora of fascinating people and produced a book that is largely all about her. And that would be fine if she’d written a biography and marketed it as such. But she didn’t and so every time she derails the conversation to talk about herself I just felt frustrated and lost interest a little more.

The beginning where she talks about her own blindside/Ordinary day is raw and honest and written in a way that made me feel her pain. Unfortunately, the rest of the book never quite reaches that same level and feels fairly superficial.

Sales seems to be dancing around a semi-formed idea and never quite manages to bring into focus. There were many times during the book where I found myself questioning why she was talking about this or that.

Finally, I listened to the audiobook version and I really wish I hadn’t. Sales is a terrible narrator. She clears her throat, swallows, sips water constantly and it’s really off putting.