Dear Great Book Guru,  This weekend is my family’s annual Faux Thanksgiving celebration.  Siblings, cousins, children of all ages join in the fun. Always before the day is done, someone will ask, “ Have you read anything good lately?”  Of course, I would love to have an answer- do you have something I can read in the next few days?

Faux Thanksgiving Fan

Dear Faux Thanksgiving Fan, My good friend Rosie recently left a wonderful book on my porch: OLIVE, AGAIN by Elizabeth Strout. This is Strout’s seventh novel and a sequel to her 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner OLIVE KITTERIDGE.  Here we pick up Olive’s story a few weeks after the earlier novel closes.  The setting is the same: a small coastal village in Maine, and each of the thirteen chapters is a short story that can easily stand alone.   Many characters reappear and we get new insights into their original stories, with time moving relentlessly on. Olive starts out as a seventy-year-old and by the end of the book, she is eighty-six.  In the opening story, we meet her second husband - a brash academic from Harvard who gradually reveals the details of his fall from grace and glory; later in the novel, he meets up with his past at a local fast food restaurant.   In another chapter, Olive spends Christmas holidays with her son and his family only to realize as the visit ends, she has always been a bad mother. When we last meet Olive, she is still prickly, but more aware and less judgmental, yet someone to be feared, respected, and…yes, loved. Highly recommended!