I quite like audiobooks for travelling and pottering around, books where I don't need to constantly be engaged and calculating the stakes, and this did fulfil that brief. It was just a little bit too fluffy for my liking and I wasn't massively keen on the way that Abigail was written.
Suddenly finding herself without the career that had come to absolutely define her life (not helped by it being the only thing that her mother was interested in about her, her love for her children seemingly very dependent on how much they offered in potential bragging rights!), I did really feel Abbie's sense of suddenly being unanchored and struggling to understand who she actually was without that career. The shame that came about from that also felt realistic and, trying out the "community table", it was made sense that the life she'd had as a career woman was incompatible with the uncertainty and anxiety of her present state. Through her gradually developing bond with the other misfits on the community table, she had the opportunity to reconcile the person she was with the person she could be and how that, perhaps, circumstances had conspired to challenge the values she held that were perhaps misguided.
They *were* a group of misfits, a little too deliberately so at times, and it did lead to a somewhat repetitive stream on consciousness from Abigail where she'd have a "shucks, what ma like? Judging people without understanding them!" moment. Trust your audience, don't lay it on with a spade. It was in this aspect of Abigail's characterisation that I struggled, the constantly laying on thick of Abigail's self-doubts played off as cutesy and compassionate to the point of presenting her as completely asinine. Quality character writing doesn't depend on deconstructing your character constantly to stress what a good person they are!
As for the plot of the misfits coming together to raise money and awareness for homelessness, it was contrived but thoughtful enough? I mean, could have done without every other event in Abigail's life somehow clashing with her charitable commitments and more bland, guilty musings from Abigail and just what was that romance? Utterly baffling that we were expected to care, even more so for the "triumphant" happy ending of a couple of which one half was presented as a few disjointed text messages for 95% of the book.
It did the job of being a listenable book without too dramatic stakes though, so...yep!