Olive Kitteridge

Book: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Finished: February 2009
Pages: 270
Challenges:
**Winter Reading Challege 2009
**To Be Read Challenge
** A-Z Challenge
** Read and Review Challenge
** Support Your Local Library
** 20 in 2009
**(added later: Pulitzer Prize Winner)

First Sentence: "For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summer-time roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy."

Last Sentence: "She did not want to leave it yet."

This was an interesting book for me--I felt different ways about it at different times in the story. Some of the time, I plain did not like Olive--she seemed plain old mean and nasty and crass. The people in the town, stars of various chapters were about as woeful as they come most of the time, but as the book went on, I began to see hers and theirs humanity a bit more--and by the end, I was pulling for her to find happiness. This is a series of short stories, set in Crosby Maine, and Olive makes an appearance in every one-inter-relating with the other people in her town. We see Olive struggle with her love for a man other than her husband in her early years, her struggles with raising her son, perhaps loving him too tightly-and the subsequent sadness her adult son brings to her in his adulthood. We see Olive take care of a husband who has suffered a stroke and we see her reach out to a sad little young lady suffering from an eating disorder. By the end of the book, we see Olive as just plain human struggling through life like the rest of us, trying to maneuver through all the changes life throws at us as we age.

I enjoyed Strout's prose and look forward to reaidng another book by her this year sometime, Abide With Me.