Strout dives right in with what is absolutely the best description of a baby shower I’ve read. The second chapter begins with “Two days earlier, Olive Kitteridge had delivered a baby” and from there on I couldn’t put it down. To begin this book with a character who barely knows Olive kind of threw me. The sequel begins with Olive mourning the death of her husband and struggling to maintain a relationship with her son Christopher and her grandchildren.Īctually – and this is maybe the one weak point in the book – it opens with a character, Jack Kennison, who isn’t terribly sympathetic, based on his attitudes towards his gay daughter and recently deceased wife. Olive, Again is written in Strout’s signature style of introducing new characters in each chapter so that the book feels like connected short stories rather than a novel. Corinna Lothar is a Washington writer, critic and frequent contributor to The Washington Times.Great news for Olive Kitteridge fans - author Elizabeth Strout has published a sequel and it is fantastic.Olive is a survivor, and on “a glorious autumn … he world sparkled, and the yellows and reds, and orange and pale pinks, were just splendid … and every morning when she opened the door she was aware of the beauty of the world.” So, too, has Miss Strout opened a door for us onto the beauty of Crosby’s world. She did not know who she was, or what would happen to her.”
… She realized it was as though she had - all her life - four big wheels beneath her, without even knowing it, of course, and now they were, all four of them, wobbling and about to come off. Helen’s drunken fall leads to an inner peace for all when honesty overcomes hostility.Īfter her heart attack, Olive felt “this gaping bright universe of loneliness that she faced. Jim, who has made a fortune as a lawyer in New York, would like to live in Crosby, but Helen cannot bear the small town. The encounter is a disaster the women dislike one another Bob yearns for New York (and his ex-wife) but Margaret hates the city. Olive is barely mentioned in “Exiles.” Brothers Jim and Bob were the central characters in Miss Strout’s “The Burgess Boys.” With their wives, Helen and Margaret, they are getting together in Crosby where Bob and Margaret live, after Jim and Helen drop off their grandson at camp. When Olive overhears her daughter-in-law yell at her grandson, she feels this was an opening “into the darkness of a relationship one saw by mistake, as if inside a dark barn, the door had been momentarily blown off and one saw things not meant to be seen.” The children refuse to talk to, or even look at, her. In “Motherless Child,” Olive’s son, Christopher, and his family come to visit.
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