Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout - A Short Summary and Review
Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout - A Short Summary and Review
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review
A short summary:
Set in the coastal town of Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge unfolds through a series of interlinked stories that revolve around Olive, acerbic, perceptive, difficult, and the people whose lives brush up against hers. Some chapters place Olive squarely at the center; others reveal her influence from the margins.
Through marriages, disappointments, illnesses, small kindnesses, and quiet betrayals, the novel maps the interior lives of ordinary people with extraordinary care. Olive is not easy to love, but she is impossible to ignore, and through her, Strout captures the complicated ways people endure one another, fail one another, and sometimes, unexpectedly, understand each other.
My favorite quote from the book:
Questions to ponder while reading:
My review:
I think I know a couple of Olives.
That recognition is what makes this book so effective. Elizabeth Strout writes characters who feel uncomfortably real, prickly, wounded, compassionate in flashes, and often misunderstood. Olive herself is bracingly honest, and her sharp edges conceal a deep, if awkward, moral seriousness.
These are very complicated characters living very ordinary lives, and that’s where the power lies. The book made me pause more than once to wonder whether my own relationships are as layered and opaque as the ones on the page, and whether I’m as aware of the damage and tenderness I carry into them.
Olive Kitteridge is quiet, searching, and deeply human. It doesn’t resolve people; it reveals them.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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