Once again, I’m woefully behind in my book blogging! *sigh* One of these days I will actually get and stay caught up on my posting. But for now, let me get to a book that I finished reading well over a month ago.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and chosen for my library book club’s March selection, Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, Olive Kitteridge, is a collection of inter-related stories that take place in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine and feature, to varying degrees, the eponymous character, Olive, a retired schoolteacher.

Olive is cantakerous and abrasive, but also at times compassionate and perceptive – a complex character who is neither a heroine nor a villain. She’s someone you don’t quite like but can’t help wanting to read more about her anyway. In some of these stories, she’s the main attraction; in others, her presence is barely more than a passing reference. The other townspeople fill up the cast of characters, including Olive’s loving yet beleaguered husband, Henry; a past-her-prime lounge singer; a troubled man haunted by his mother’s suicide; and a young woman who longs for a normal life. Those are just a few of the residents of Crosby whom we encounter in these pages, offering us a snapshot of a typical small town and the extraordinary lives it hides behind a veneer of normalcy.

The women of my book club were split on their reaction to Olive and this book. Some felt that Olive was too unsympathetic for them to sympathize with her and they would have preferred a traditional novel format. Others, like me, appreciated the writing style and the author’s approach to telling the story through vignettes rather than a straightforward novel, and while they couldn’t say that they liked Olive, they certainly saw her as an authentic portrayal of a complicated woman.