It was a little unsettling and disappointing to leave most of the stories in suspension if not all of them and I felt that the Christopher character and his two wives were pretty two dimensional.
But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naive, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.
Your mother taught you that! This 2009 Pulitzer winner is fully deserving of its accolades and superfans.
She has taken the novel-in-stories and used it to introduce us to the many diverse and far-flung characters upon whose disparate lives her title character has imparted some bit of change, some bit of love, or wisdom, or influence, and in doing so Strout has shown that we are infinitely complex creatures who, no matter how long or short our duration on this plane, will leave change in our wake.
However, I felt that the writing was ok, the narration was interesting, but I never even came close to feeling some sympathy or connection to Olive like I did for Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or, say, Bellow's Dean Corde.
Description: I will explain Every once in a while in a review, I will try to make a precarious point, in which my argument comes very close to making me sound like a huge asshole when in fact it should only make me sound like kind of an asshole, like always.