Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge      
by Elizabeth Strout
$14.00

Paperback: 304 pages

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 30, 2008)

ISBN-10: 0812971833

ISBN-13: 978-0812971835

Annotation/Flashtalk:

 A collection of short stories about life in a small town in Crosby, Maine; the stories are strung together by the common thread of a local resident Olive Kitteridge.

Summary:

The novel is a collection of short stories all linked by the common thread of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher, living in Crosby, Maine.  It is through these stories that we learn about the residents of Crosby, but we also learn about Olive. The novel delves into the Olive’s relationship with her marriage to her husband Henry, and later how she copes with his life after a stroke.  We find out about her strained relationship with her son Christopher, his first wife, and about the family he builds with his second wife and Olive’s grandchild, so far away from the home she and Henry built by hand for him. 

In the first chapter of the novel Olive warns us that as a pharmacist, Henry knows all of the town’s secrets and how important it is not to spread it as gossip; ironically, the novel feels a bit like we are doing just that, reading about the town’s gossip.  As the chapters pass, we learn there is trauma in the lives of the town’s people of Crosby, and tragedy in Olive’s personal life as well.  This is a novel not just about the human condition, but about life, sanity, insanity and redemption.

Genre/Subgenre: General Fiction/Short Stories/Pulitzer Prize Winner

Evaluation: 2-stars.