I finished reading this book last week and I'm still thinking about it. I love a book that sticks with me for awhile. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. This book has engaging characters and a good sense of place. Since those are two things I really need in a book it was a good read for me. If you like your books to be linear and have a definite plot, you may not like it so much. The book is actually 13 stories, that all take place in a little town called Crosby, Maine. Olive Kitteridge is a character who appears in each of the stories. Sometimes she or her actions are the main thrust of the stories, and sometimes she's just mentioned in passing, or remembered for something she once said or did. I thought it was a great storytelling device - one that I have not encountered before to this extent. The characters in these various stories are all people engaged in a struggle of one kind or another. Struggles every adult would be familiar with - failed marriages, tension filled relationships, illness of one kind or another, unfulfilled dreams. Olive, herself, is a formidable woman - crabby, unrelenting in her criticism, insecure, and mostly, as she puts it, misunderstood. She realizes some things way too late and must live with the consequences. She also delivers some laugh out loud observations on the folly of human behavior. Strout delivers prose that is so crisp, so concise and to the point - whole philosophies are delivered in a couple of sentences and a look, or a cross word or gentle caress can reveal a character's whole backstory. And in the background, giving the characters depth and placing them in context is the setting. The Maine coastline offers up the beauty and hardship that these stories tell. The waters of the bay that the little town sits on sparkle in the sunlight making characters hopeful for the future. The gray November skies close in on people already dying slow deaths. The gentle breezes blow summer grasses this way and that on the sand beaches, making us wish we were there even though we know it's a place not without sorrow and heartbreak.

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