Book Review - The Woman With All The Answers by Linda Green

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Title: The Woman With All The Answers

Author: Linda Green

Format reviewed: Ebook

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Boldwood Books

Publication Date: 26th February 2025

Rating: 5 Stars

**Alexa knows your family better than you do. Now you're about to get to know her... **

Fifty-two-year-old Michelle Banks is struggling to keep all the plates spinning. She’s a perimenopausal district nurse, caring for elderly parents. Her husband is wasting their money on children’s TV memorabilia, her teenage daughter is riddled with anxiety and her sixteen-year-old son is behaving secretively.

Alexa is the only one who knows how much Michelle is juggling. Listening in via four smart speakers, she also knows that it’s about to get even worse.

So, when Michelle pleads for help from the woman with all the answers, Alexa decides to go rogue and reveal her true identity as Pauline – a sixty-five-year-old former voiceover artist from Halifax – to teach Michelle everything she knows…

Wise, funny, relatable and inspiring, The Woman With All The Answers is perfect for fans of Clare Pooley, Mike Gayle and David Nicholls.

This is utterly brilliant.  It is so much funnier than I was expecting but also emotional at times, and left me feeling uplifted. 

It is also surprisingly believable, given it explains that Alexa (the google virtual assistant) is voiced by a team of women, each one having their own family, who is a real person and not an algorithm, or AI or anything.  And it turns out the person behind Michelle's Alexa is due to retire and is about to go rogue! 

Michelle is stressed, tired, at her wits end, attempting to deal with all of her various family members, the ones she lives with, plus her father, her mother in law and then her mother comes back into her life too. 

We have a Marc who works from home and may have a slight Ebay habit, Liv her A-Level age daughter who is suffering from anxiety and doesn't want to leave the house, let alone go back to school and sit her exams, or contemplate anything after that, and Callum who is 16 and who is having to deal with peer pressure. 

There are some truly hilarious moments, some rather mortifying ones, there is a brush with the police, a rather memorable doctor's appointment, and a whole lot more. 

And in between that we have chapters from "Alexa"'s point of view, where we get to see behind the scenes of life as a virtual personal assistant, can discover just how much all of our technology is interconnected and spying on us, and of this particular Alexa's compassion for the family she has been aiding for six years. 

It's hard to fully explain this book, but it deals with real issues that anyone could encounter.  The characters are relatable and I think I'm going to miss them now I have finished reading. 

It's really quick and easy to read and I loved every single second of it.  It's just brilliant and one of my favourite Linda Green books easily.  So happy to see this talented author back writing in this genre, I've missed it and look forward already to her next book. 

Thank you to Boldwood Books and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.