Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

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 […]

Portrait of an Ordinary Woman

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Olive Kitteridge is a book about folks in Crosby, Maine, basically a collection of short stories that amount to a (light) novel. Each story is about someone in Crosby, Maine–sometimes Olive is the main character, and sometimes she makes an appearance as a supporting character or even in someone’s memory. Olive is a sourpuss middle-aged lady, big-boned and no-nonsense. She’s described by different characters as scary, large, imposing, and she knows these things about herself with a kind of partial self-awareness that felt extremely familiar. […]



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