This book was like a hostage situation. I kept waiting and waiting for something to happen and at the beginning there was anticipation but then I just wanted the bloody thing to be over with

Standard Deviation is a quirky story of Graham Cavanaugh, hippy wife Audra and their son who has Aspergers.
The couple do their best to support their son and his interests.
I was expecting Standard Deviation to be a really good read but I was just a little disappointed. Not really my cup of tea But grateful for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was drawn into this book immediately - I just loved it from page one. The book as such has no plot, rather it ambles through the lives of Graham and Audra and all whom they come into contact with. Not forgetting also their son Matthew and those he interacts with too - especially the members of the Origami Club.

Maybe you feel already the book is not for you, and you may be right if you like a beginning, middle and end, rather than a peek into other people's lives. It's kind of like an extended sitcom episode where you just love all the characters and wish you could be there with them.Don't get me wrong plenty happens, but it's just life - however in the hands of Katherine Heiny it is laugh out loud funny.

The star of the book for me is Audra - and whilst you may think she is an empty bucket that makes the most noise, when you look deep down, as Graham her husband often does, you see that actually she's quiet the strategist. Mainly to progress her son she forges bonds and unlikely friendships but there is also a very kind side to her demonstrated through the multitude of house guests invited to stay - and we aren't talking overnight here.

Audra also has some cracking lines such as "...his employee discount to buy some scented candles and I told him he should buy one for Elspeth but he said she didn't believe in them. How can you not believe in scented candles? They're not like UFOs". I could quote so many more fantastic lines like that.

I'm giving this book 5 out of 5 stars and my thanks go to Netgalley for a copy to review

Quirky, charming & disturbingly relatable with a cast of characters who feel very real. Highly recommended.

I didn't enjoy this book very much. I persevered until the end, but I was very underwhelmed.

I liked the insight into the seemingly perfect life and what it was really like. Overall, a disappointment.

I loved this book from start to finish and could read it again. At point it was so funny and then it made you stop and think. Please bring out another.

A seemingly hilarious emotionally scatterbrained read, that will have you chuckling out loud. But will also make perfect sense. Just so enjoyable.
Loved it.

What a joyful find was this book. Audra is a genius creation and hopefully will come again. Wonderfully readable, skilfully written and oh so laugh out loud funny. A book to tell every friend to read.

Quite funny with a plot so twisted I ended up wondering if I understood it at all.

I don't like this habit of adding things to the title - 'The beach read of summer 2017' - totally unnecessary and I think the phrase beach read gives the wrong impression of this book. Please, publishers/Amazon, stop doing this!
Not too much of a plot or action in this book, but it grabbed and kept my attention throughout. A quirky story, with witty and wry observations about people ... this all sounds very boring but actually it isn't. I was very pleased to receive a review copy because I don't think I would have come across this book otherwise, and I really enjoyed it.

Excellent and very insightful into what Halle s in real life! Thoroughly enjoyed thus book!

There are no words to describe how much I ADORED this book. Very similar to Maria Semple and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, this book was beautifully written and incredibly descriptive. It was laugh-out-loud funny and moving in equal parts and Audra must be one of the best comedy characters ever created. I mourned the end of this novel when it came to an end - one of my favourite books for 2017 so far. Simply incredible/

Going to be as honest as can be, I read about 5 chapters and I couldn't get into it. I don't know what it was about the book but I just couldn't read it anymore this is the second book I have found to be like this and personally it isn't for me. Maybe in the future I would try to read again however just right now I can't.

It was a light read, but nothing more than that. The sharp oneliners didn't make up for the furthermore shallow characters. Do such people as Graham and Audra exist? (Yes, I know, they do, sadly.) It wasn't very realistic, those people and their white men's problems - at some point, I was thinking: for once, just look outside your Manhattan bubble. And okay, they did: the family went on a trip to an origami conference, but their ideas were so condescending, as if they were in a zoo, looking at monkeys. "Such strange people, outside the bubble..." And then the nothingness of Graham - just letting life pass by, and never making any decisions - or so it seemed to me. No, this wasn't my kind of book; not funny enough to be as shallow as it is, and nowhere near anything that's bordering on a real life and real people - or, at least, I hope this last words to be true...

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ebook ARC.

4★
“People came to Audra for advice— well, no, not advice, that was the wrong word. They came to her for secrets, for gossip, for connections— for intel, that was the term— about everything. Friends sought her expertise on their job interviews, on their children’s chances of getting into private schools, on marriage counselors, on hairdressers, on au pairs, on restaurants, on shops, on neighborhood watches, on gyms, on doctors, on internet providers. People asked her about local politics and she didn’t even know who the mayor of New York City was! (Well, she probably did know who the mayor was, but it wasn’t a certainty by any means.)”

Audra is Graham’s second wife, younger than his first and mother of ten-year-old Matthew, who has Asperger’s and is currently fascinated with origami.

The author tells the story from Graham’s point of view, but not in his voice. I think he has lived with Audra so long now that his thinking is often the stream-of-consciousness that her speech patterns are. She races breathlessly from one subject to another off on a random tangent to some other vaguely connected fact or opinion until she (usually) seems to arrive back at the starting point. I don’t recall her losing her train of thought the way I do when I veer off course the same way.

She’s the kind of person who, by the end of a taxi ride to the airport, would know the driver’s kids’ names, the schools they go to, and the state of their health. Not only that, she would have given her advice on the schools in their area and the local doctors, and the driver would feel warm and friendly towards her, not annoyed as you might have thought, and the driver and family are probably coming to dinner when Audra returns home.

[Disclaimer: I chat with taxi drivers about all sorts of things, too, unless they’ve got their Bluetooth earpiece and handsfree phone going and are jabbering away a mile-a-minute to a friend (never the base, usually a mate or another driver) and ignoring me. I also sit in the front seat (which we do in Australia, particularly men do), unless it’s full of their books and lunch, which is how they claim their territorial rights. And once, I even wrote a statutory declaration for a court hearing for a driver who was accused of stopping in the wrong place to pick me up, ( he did, because I was in the wrong place, limping with a walking stick after an operation, and he took pity on me), so I gave him my name and address and said contact me if you get into trouble over this, so he did, but like Audra, I digress. ]

Audra knew everything about almost everybody at the ends of her long, spidery web of contacts.

“But there was no doubt that Audra knew people, and she knew things about people, and often she knew things about people who knew other people who knew people who had brothers who worked in the State Department and it was very helpful when your passport got stolen.”

The book begins light-heartedly enough, with Graham providing the predictable, stable counterpoint to his vivacious, pretty wife who keeps adopting stray houseguests. For example:

“Last year the locksmith who came to fix the dead bolt ended up sleeping in the den for two nights because his wife had stopped speaking to him due to the fact that he insisted on cutting the dead skin off his feet with a very small pair of scissors instead of using a pumice stone. (‘Have you ever heard of anything so ludicrous?’ Audra asked. Yes, he had: letting the locksmith sleep over. Although the locksmith had repaired their toaster for free.)”

Surprisingly, Graham just sets another place at the table. He is the chief cook and bottle-washer, and a gourmet cook he is. He loves it. He tells us often what he’s making and occasionally reminisces about a particularly fine meal. Turns out that his first wife, Elspeth, a beautiful, icy, blonde Scandinavian-looking lawyer, was a gourmet cook as well, and they shared that passion (among other things).

Audra wants them all to be friends, first and second wives, which leads to some interesting dynamics and Graham’s somewhat rekindled interest in her and her uncluttered, sleek, ultra-modern apartment compared to his cluttered, child-centred family mess.

Michael is a nice kid. Graham is just really realising what life is going to be like for Michael as he gets older and doesn’t have parents to try to make friends for him, and it breaks his heart. When they discover there is an Origami Club, Michael is ecstatic, and of course the members are much older and eccentric, but Michael loves it. There’s much talk of the various creations and how many folds they take. [I assume they are the real deal, but I’m not obsessed enough with accuracy to look it up. Maybe the author has lived through this in her life. There are worse fixations.]

They mostly don’t go out without Michael, since he was an extremely difficult baby and child, and they still fear he may have outbursts if they aren’t there to keep him calm. So Graham is feeling a bit tied down. Both he and Audra have had plenty of other adventurous liaisons, and she frequently refers openly to things she did with some other guy. But it didn’t mean anything and she didn’t know him very well, so that’s okay, then.

He’s starting to get nostalgic about Elspeth and her clean, Scandinavian style. They were married for several years. How bad could it have been?

“. . . often when Graham himself neatened up, when he pushed in the dining room chairs, or centered a candlestick on a table, Elspeth would come along right behind him and readjust the chair or candlestick by an inch. It was as though she didn’t want objects in the apartment to get the wrong idea and start thinking Graham was the boss.”

That bad. It’s no wonder he enjoys a good drop at the end of the day before and while he’s concocting his exotic meals.

“The first drink was unbeatable: delicious, relaxing, restorative— practically medicinal. He had read that alcohol didn’t enter your bloodstream for twenty minutes after the first sip, but everyone knew that was nonsense; it started working as soon as you poured it into the glass.”

[I couldn’t agree more. I know, alcohol is a poisonous destroyer of internal organs with few, if any, redeeming physical features – unless you’re living in the Old West and having your tooth pulled or a limb amputated, in which case they ply you with whiskey, but I can’t imagine there’s enough in the world to make either of those things bearable! Plus, I am a fan of the excellent book, "High Sobriety: my year without booze" by Aussie author Jill Stark, so I really do know better!]

I realise I’ve quoted a lot and believe me, it’s that kind of book. It’s like reading a continuing series of articles or maybe the script for a good sit-com. Almost too light, but with enough truths that you will probably recognise a few things about yourself that others may find quirky. I just hope they find you and me as appealing as Graham finds Audra.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the preview copy from which I’ve quote (so much!). Quotes may have changed, but I’m sure the spirit hasn’t.

Funny, witty, clever and sassy and Audra is a wonderful comic invention.

This is so true to life and I found myself alternatively nodding and laughing.

A great beach read - but better written than most.

It is quite witty, probably unintentionally so and possibly because there were many things that rang a bell for me. I personally know someone who talks as much as a tribal leader telling a tale that takes twenty paths and fifty corners before coming to a conclusion.

Graham introduces us to his life, his second wife and the autistic son they have together. The way he describes his wife could be perceived as mocking or as a slightly ironic take on his own situation. He loves her and yet he finds her traits annoying at times, despite the clear advantages he has from being married to a woman with connections and one who talks like a waterfall. What they do have in common, he often wonders, what is it that keeps the two of them together?

The one thing he can’t deny is the way they come together when it comes to their son and his Asperger’s. They are both willing to go the extra length to make sure he is comfortable, at ease and happy.

One of the things that makes him feel at ease is origami, the art of paper folding. The whole joining the origami club is one of the funnier aspects of this story, despite the serious element of why the young boy loves folding paper.

It isn’t uncommon for people in couples to wonder whether the grass is greener on the other side or in this case if the grass he has already walked on has suddenly become greener and more inviting. Graham knows why he left his first wife, and yet the forbidden fruits they dangle in a way that makes him question his decisions. Quite bizarrely he is a jealous man, and the thought of his second wife doing anything similar drives him up the wall.

In the midst of all the humour there is a serious tone to the story. Taking care of children on the autism spectrum, coping with the complexities of divorce and marriage, and mystery of the workings of the male mind.

Where to start trying to explain this quirky book? Told by New Yorker, Graham Cavanaugh - a sixty year old financial man, keen cook, devoted father of Matthew, ex husband of Elsbeth and husband of Audra.

Graham wonders how he can have have married two such different women. Elsbeth was cool, self contained, almost obsessively neat and controlled. None of these adjectives could ever be applied to Audra! Audra lives in a state of almost chaos. There is no-one she won't talk to, knows the ins and out of the lives of people who have only touched theirs peripherally. Every stray person with nowhere to go, ends up arriving for dinner, sometimes staying for months- something Graham accepts with gentle humour and compassion.

They both love their son Matthew who has Asperger's Syndrome. They try hard to encourage his friendships, help him make sense of his world and try to fit in with his current fads. When Matthew develops a passion for origami we are introduced to even more wacky characters- who all end up being invited to Thanksgiving Dinner.

The title 'Standard Deviation' refers to how far from the 'norm' Matthew is, but reading this book it leaves you wondering what is the 'norm'- certainly very few of these engaging characters seem entirely what one would consider normal!

At turns this is a hilarious and sad book. It is one I would recommend, as its appeal covers many genres. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me read and review this fascinating book.

Standard deviation
Just like the mathematical term the novel is all about the people in the range of the main character's life; those closest to us and those on the edges of our lives.

This is a novel about Graham and how he reflects on his choices and relationships in life. His second wife is comical in her need to know everyone and everything, but easy to like. Matthew their son, with asbegers, is a challenge but highlights parental devotion. The ex-wife is easy to dislike despite his regrets.

This is a lovely, easy read about life and how we need to stop, take stock, be happy with what we have and move on.

I recommend this as a light, relaxing holiday read.

I received a free copy from net galley.com for my fair and honest review.

This was an entertaining read with some great laugh out loud moments - my main complaint is that I don't think the ending was all that great and I would have liked the author to explore some of the story lines she raised with slightly more detail - an enjoyable read all the same...