Guest book review by Karen Khornberger of Olive Kitteridge’s ‘A Novel in Stories’ which she gave 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads:
Olive Kitteridge is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel which is a collection of stories of people in one small town that are all in ways connected to the main character, Olive. The comments on the book state that the characters are developed showing strong human characteristics and I agree wholeheartedly. As I read the stories, I was either blown over by the decisions the characters were making or by their thought processes in general. After the chapters, you were left craving more of that person's story. I think the most amazing thing about this novel is that you could psychoanalyze each character for a lifetime. Elizabeth Strout rocks the boat a lot with the behaviors of the characters and, although the behaviors really can be bizarre, when you think about each character and their circumstances they are behaviors which are all essentially understandable and provoke empathy. The character I had the least empathy for was Olive herself. I was waiting to like Olive and I never achieved that. That is not why I am giving this novel four stars because I actually like that Olive did not get tied up into a happy package for me (I find Olive more believable as a human because she is one of the ones I can just state I don't like her) I am giving it four stars instead of five because I wish Ms. Strout would have not dropped a lot of the stories and provided answers to what happened to some of the characters through the latter stories.
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