Pocket Books (Paperback), 2007
270 Pages
This book is part of my Popsugar Reading Challenge 2015.
The category for this book is ‘a Pulitzer prize winning book’.
BLURB FROM THE COVER
Olive Kitteridge is indomitable, compassion and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, struggling to make sense of the changes in her life as she grows older. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of others, discerning their triumphs and tragedies.
We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost – and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feel tyrannized by her overbearing sensitivies.
EXTRACT
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, on rainy roads, or summertime 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.
PHARMACY
REVIEW
This was my first time reading Elizabeth Strout.
I enjoyed Olive Kitteridge. I liked the structure of the novel, how Strout splits it into thirteen short stories connected by Oliver and her husband Henry, their son Christopher and various people they encounter in the small town where they live. Olive is not a very nice person. She’s harsh and abrasive and downright horrible at times. But she’s honest and real and I sort of loved her in spite of it all. I have an aunt just like Olive. Everyone in the family sort of hates her because she can be so unpleasant. I get on with her like a house on fire. Olive Kitteridge was a bit slow to start then picked up pace after a couple of stories. I didn’t love Olive Kitteridge but I really enjoyed it, much more than I expected actually. I was dreading reading a Pulitzer prize-winning novel because I had this idea it would be stuffy and boring and not my thing. Olive Kitteridge was a pleasant surprise.
RATING
