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nina_reads_books 's review for:
Abide With Me
by Elizabeth Strout
I have been slowly making my way through Elizabeth Strout’s back catalogue and I am such a fan of her writing. She is so keenly aware of the humanness of her characters, her writing is quiet and contemplative and she writes the New England area of America so well.
Having said that I don’t always love the actual stories she writes and this was the case with Abide With Me. Tyler Caskey is a minister in rural Maine in the 1950’s. We meet him in the aftermath of his wife’s death and as the story goes on his grief begins to become insurmountable. His daughter Katherine all but gives up speaking and is struggling at school, his housekeeper is accused of a crime and disappears and the entire congregation begin to gossip about Tyler.
In this particular case I found the heavy focus on religion a bit much. The judgment of many of the female characters was also so uncomfortable to witness – though this may indeed be Strout’s intention! Nevertheless I still enjoyed the writing as always. This is a book about the weight of grief and the power people have to impact others in both wonderful and terrible ways. The way that this is expressed through the interactions between characters is very clever. Abide With Me was another one of Strout’s books that I listened to on audio and I really enjoy consuming them this way.
Having said that I don’t always love the actual stories she writes and this was the case with Abide With Me. Tyler Caskey is a minister in rural Maine in the 1950’s. We meet him in the aftermath of his wife’s death and as the story goes on his grief begins to become insurmountable. His daughter Katherine all but gives up speaking and is struggling at school, his housekeeper is accused of a crime and disappears and the entire congregation begin to gossip about Tyler.
In this particular case I found the heavy focus on religion a bit much. The judgment of many of the female characters was also so uncomfortable to witness – though this may indeed be Strout’s intention! Nevertheless I still enjoyed the writing as always. This is a book about the weight of grief and the power people have to impact others in both wonderful and terrible ways. The way that this is expressed through the interactions between characters is very clever. Abide With Me was another one of Strout’s books that I listened to on audio and I really enjoy consuming them this way.