This was my favorite read of the year for 2019! Really admire Elizabeth Strout’s work. She writes
masterful sentences and creates indelible characters who are not always
likeable, but fully human...and surely entertaining!
A prickly Maine woman finds hard-won wisdom as she butts up
against the challenges of aging and ordinary life--and others struggling to
survive.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive
Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
(My Name Is Lucy Barton) traced the life of a rigidly
stoic, set-in-her-ways, lifelong inhabitant of fictional Crosby, Maine.
Olive--a former high school math teacher and the wife of a small-town
pharmacist--is judgmental, with often-grating hard edges that forge her
opinions and resilience.
In Olive,
Again, Strout picks up Olive's story in her seventh and eighth decades.
Olive, an aging widow, contends with a now elusive world and her feelings for
widower Jack Kennison, the antithesis of Olive. Jack, a staunch Republican and
former professor at Harvard, migrated to Crosby after a co-worker accused him
of sexual harassment and he was fired. He is drawn to Olive, questioningly.
As the narrative unfolds, readers learn that Olive and Jack have
married. Despite their vastly different pedigrees, they are moored in similar
emotional harbors, which unites them. Olive and Jack had first marriages to
good people, yet both carry--and grapple with--guilt. Loneliness plagues them.
They take stock of their fates, choices and destinies in a changing world,
while facing the often-humiliating infirmities of aging. Jack tries to
reconnect with his estranged daughter, a lesbian whom he never accepted.
Similarly, Olive contends with her strained relationship with her son, who's
married and raising a blended family in New York City.
The 13 episodic stories that constitute Olive,
Again are deep and
meaningful--made richly entertaining and accessible through Strout's skillful blend of the
serious with the comedic.
Olive, Again: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout
Random House, $27.00 Hardcover, 9780812996548, 304 pages
Publication Date: October 15, 2019
To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE
NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted
with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (October 25, 2019), link HERE