Olive Kitteridge

I love this book because it is not afraid to look at deep sadness and disappointment in an honest and complex way. This novel is a collection of short stories that all take place in a coastal Main town and are connected by the large presence of Olive.

Olive is intelligent, acerbic, and abrasive. She is anything but easy. I appreciate the compassion Strout gives her imperfect characters as they struggle with their messy lives. I grew to care more for Olive as I traveled her rocky path with her, even as she was often the one to throw down… show more.

If I looked up “curmudgeon” in the dictionary, I’d half expect to find Olive’s picture. Perpetually grumpy and disappointed that the people around her don’t live up to her expectations (something I can relate to!), Olive is difficult, demanding, and often outrageous.

Yet her quirky charm has caused millions of readers—including me—to fall under her spell. I followed Olive’s journey with interest, hoping she’d find peace if not happiness.

The highly original, unconventional structure of this book has also made it one of my favorites. I love how Strout weaves Olive in and out of the action in this novel… show more.

I found this book absolutely riveting.

Outspoken, cantankerous, deep-hearted Olive Kitteridge is a character unlike any other, and I loved how the interconnected stories let us see her, her family, and her community at various points in time and how their decisions and ways of being affect the arcs of their lives.

I loved the complexity and uniqueness of all the characters, as well as the insights that this book offers about the intricacies, nuances, difficulties, and joys of being human. 

Elizabeth Strout is a master of character, and this cycle of linked stories, which takes place in the coastal town of Crosby, Maine, is no exception; following the eponymous Olive over several years, she appears as a major character in some stories, and a minor one in others.

I grew up in a small town beside the ocean, and Strout’s descriptive powers transported me to the salinated air and buoy-knocked waters of my youth.

But it’s her observations about human nature, filtered through the town’s tight-knit community, that makes the book so powerful. She examines questions that haunt us all:… show more.

As a writer of short fiction and novels, I absolutely love Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge. 

When I finished the book, I immediately began rereading it–to marvel, again, at the masterful craft on display, such as Strout’s handling of time and description, but above all to savor her depth of psychological insight. The thirteen narratives, each in some way involving Olive, hold within them the many colors of human experience ranging from quiet states of joy in the ordinary to the quietly agonizing hells of loneliness, disappointment, fear, and loss. 

And the character studies dramatize just… show more.

Olive Kitteridge is one of my favorite fictional characters—not because she’s likable (she often isn’t), but because she feels so real.

She is impatient, stubborn, often downright caustic. But she can also be softhearted, sensitive, and insightful. In many ways, Olive reminds me of some of the best Maine women I know, capturing the New England spirit of hard work and blunt language that seamlessly coexists with tenderness and humor.

Strout’s other characters in this book are just as relatable, and she does an incredible job of showing another quality prevalent throughout Maine: keeping your secrets and emotions to yourself,… show more.

We all have a bit of Olive Kitteridge in us.

The book is about an indomitable retired New England school teacher who has lived by the rules and done what was expected of her until midlife when she starts to wake up. Perhaps it was being taken as a hostage or meeting a woman with anorexia and realising they are both ‘starving’. Olive’s world tilts.

She struggles to make sense of her life, suffers regret, and feels she’s failed. Strout employs different characters to tell stories; in some, Olive plays only a tiny part. But the technique deepens our appreciation… show more.

The Pulitzer-prize winner Olive Kitteridge is a novel told through connected stories, and the sequel is presented the same way.

She’s the character we love to hate and learn to love.

Anyone who has married the wrong man or treated a husband poorly, or attempted to control a child well into his own middle age, or finds herself confused by progress and also struggles with regret, will get Olive. Because we meet her in midlife, we evolve with her into old age, as if an interactive experience.

You'll want to age with Olive in the sequel, Olive Again. I also… show more.

Written as a collection of short stories, each depicting crusty Olive Kitteridge in a different scenario, this novel brilliantly portrays a harsh woman who causes me to question why I love her so much. We see Olive’s self-awareness and sometimes tender side as she moves through her life. We see her in a relationship with her kind husband and with various townsfolks, always bringing her sardonic honesty. When I read Olive’s story for the first time, I surprised myself by falling l in love with her despite her startling relational gaffs. I believe we all have a little more of… show more.

This is one of the really great books of our time. Olive Kitteridge is an anti-protagonist in her own story, a woman who passes through the chapters of this novel, only visiting the tales Strout shares with the reader. She is always present and always peripheral, and the distance that places between us and her somehow seems to help us see this woman with tender clarity.