Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
**Well crafted: 10/10**
Overall: 4 stars

**Making a special appearance for this book, is the ‘well crafted’ rating. When I originally decided on the different parts of the rating system I took the assumption that all of these books would be at least moderately well written and conceived. And a fifth means of rating a book seemed like a lot. But this book is so very much in a league of its own, I have temporarily introduced the metric so that everyone knows how much it excels. (The temporary rating is very clever colleague’s idea. Thank you.)**

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. It really is the ‘American’ type of book that the Pulitzer Prize is looking for. Set in a small town on the coast of Maine in the years post 9/11, it resonates with all that is small-town Americana. But I think (hope) it would make it all the more appealing for an international audience as well.

Olive Kitteridge is the title and the central character of this story of the quietly intertwining lives of a town’s inhabitants. She is irritable, brooding, loving, passionate, and silent. She is the lynch pin of the book, tying together the narration as each chapter shifts to focus on the stories of other people’s lives. The execution is flawless. The story is tight – characters are never forgotten, or left hanging, or not somehow contributing to the progression of the novel. Whereas I often think of all of these pieces of fiction as books or stories, Strout has written a stunning novel.

A quick example: one of the characters describes her father having ‘sole custody’ of her. And for years she thought it was spelled with a u.

To the point. Pointed. But not labored or cocky.

There is little else I can say about this fantastic book. Read it. It is a book about the vastness of love, and anger, and death. Olive certainly feels these intensely. The book has a quietness about it – but the characters’ lives are not at all plodding or quaint. So it is a suppose about ‘quiet lives’ but makes the point that no life is quiet.

I do warn you of one thing: I read this a few years ago and remember not liking it all that much. I wasn’t hugely enthused about re-reading it. My turn-around, I hope, speaks in favor of the book. That said, for me it has very much been a book that displays is greatness through its prose and its craft. Don’t read it just to ‘see what happens next’. Read every word and let it sink in.