barbarahallforrest 's review for:

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

4.0

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Lucy by the Sea is the 3rd work by Elizabeth Strout that continues the story of Lucy Barton, a woman in her 60s and a successful writer living in New York City. The novel opens in the early days of 2020. William, Lucy's first husband and lifelong friend, is a scientist and convinces Lucy to leave New York with him for rural Maine in order to wait out the virus. In the ensuing months of the Pandemic, family, friendship, love, loss and isolation are examined. The sparse nature of Strout's writing is both beautiful and brilliant -- her prose is very readable yet calls out to be read slowly, in order to savor the depths of insights and experiences that are explored in the novel's characters. Especially profound for me was not only what the characters said to one another, but often what they did not say, as in Lucy's constant interior monologue with herself -- rendering Lucy's story so relatable, so terribly human: It's our duty to bear the mystery of the burden with as much grace as we can. Like Strout's other fictional character Olive Kitteridge, I cannot get enough of Lucy and hope there will be further chronicles of her in my reading future.