Longtime Maine resident, Olive Kitteridge, who is now 95, but still her crotchety, judgemental self, has some stories to tell. She summons the famous New York novelist, Lucy Barton, who lives with her ex-husband in Crosby, Maine, to document several small lives of friends and acquaintances who are not important in the mainstream but are important to Olive. Lucy is very happy to hear and discuss these stories and, in turn, tell some of her own to Olive. She also enjoys her weekly walks with old friend Bob Burgess, a lawyer in the town. Bob is mostly retired, but will still take a case if he deems it important. His wife, Maureen, is a Unitarian minister, with a vibrant congregation, who has little time for Bob's soul-searching, thus his walks with Lucy are very precious.
In this bucolic small-town setting, nothing noteworthy ever happens...until a woman's body is found on the water in the quarry. Everyone knew that "Beach Ball," or "Bitch Ball" as she was commonly known, made her children's lives a living hell and that she disappeared ten years ago. The most likely suspect was her son Matt who lived with her and took care of the house-her daughter had moved away years ago. Bob knew that he had to take the case and defend Matt against the town's certainty in his guilt, but he was old and tired, and his relationships with Maureen, Lucy and his brother Jim were wearing him down.
Strout mines the familiar territory of her other novels and uses a lot of the same characters introduced in previous books. She has a meandering style that almost put me off at first, but I stuck with it and got very involved in the small Maine communities of Crosby and Shirley Falls. She writes in a graceful and lyrical manner about nothing of consequence, which, in her hands, becomes cosmically important. When Olive questions whether the story that she told Lucy had a point, Lucy answered by saying "People, People and the lives they lead. That's the point." And that sums up this novel perfectly.
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