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Our Town, Crosby, Maine

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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Cbr13bingo Shelfie BINGO BLACKOUT Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge reads more like a short story collection than a novel. Set in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine, this book takes the reader into the lives and histories of its inhabitants with Olive at the center of many stories and on the periphery of others. Olive is a complicated woman, prone to moodiness and judgment but also capable of deep and unexpected compassion for her neighbors. Through the relationships of Crosby’s residents, Elizabeth Strout examines […]

A poignant, salty heroine

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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Set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge is a collection of short stories that occasionally feature and always reference, at least in some small way, the titular main character. Olive is practical, blunt and opinionated but not introspective regarding her own feelings. She often flouts social niceties and seems incapable of apologizing . Despite this, she is not unlikeable- she is very human, and Strout gives the reader enough backstory and detail on Olive so that we can see her emotions even […]

No Olives, Please

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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I have a friend who dislikes mushrooms and tries them again annually just to see if her taste buds have changed. I find her dislike intriguing in part because I love mushrooms and often wonder if the dissonance is due to qualia and my “mushroom” tastes different to her “mushroom” or if what I taste is identical to what she does and she doesn’t enjoy the flavor I love. My feelings about olives is similar if less intense; I don’t hate olives, but I would […]

Olive, Again (Again)

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A perusal of my library’s digital audiobook library lead me to this book as it was in the “available now/hot commodity” bucket. This book is a sequel to Olive Kitteridge and I thought I remembered liking it, so I dove in. After scanning my review of the original book I learned that I really moreso thought it just okay, and I’d say my opinion of Strout is consistent. In fact, she is so consistent that my review of this book could literally be word for […]

Imperfect love and ruthless writing

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

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This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. Unintentionally, I have read two novels in a row that have to do with imperfect mothering told from the perspectives of women who have been imperfectly parented and who in turn recognize their own shortcomings. In The Language of Flowers the narrator was quite young, an orphan, and dealing in real time with the daily ramifications of imperfect parenting. In My Name is Lucy Barton, the narrator is older, […]

She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

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This is a book that takes place in a small Maine town. The central locus of this book is Olive Kitteridge, a retired middle school math teacher with a pharmacist for a husband and a podiatrist for a son. She’s not the center of every single story in the collection, but she is the glue and often the catalyst for them separately and/or together. This is labeled as a “novel in stories” and there’s a lot of different of these floating around. Ultimately I think […]



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