A review by smusie
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

5.0

Loved it. Really great writing--I put off reading it because of the description: woman in small-town Maine. It just sounded too Anne Rivers Siddons. But one story/chapter was excerpted in The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, and I had to read it. Olive is a character that shows up in most but not all the stories. (The ones in which she doesn't actually appear, she haunts.) Fantastic character--a woman who never apologizes. I was strangely disappointed to find out that the stories were actually written separately, with in some cases years in between, and published individually before being put together in this book. Somehow I wanted it to have been planned from the very beginning as a novel. Why does it make a difference how it was written? Although it's unfair, if it had been written that way, I would have given it five stars. Oh, OK, I'm changing it to five.