Olive is back after an 11-year absence! However, for people like me who were late to board the Olive train, I only had to wait 4 days between the books! Sometimes it pays to be late! Can I just tell you that I enjoyed Olive, Again just as much or MORE than the original Olive Kitteridge? That is saying a lot because, as you recall, Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge and HBO picked it up for a 4-part miniseries that won a slew of Emmys.
Olive, Again was chosen as the November 2019 Oprah Book Club selection, which brought Oprah back on the book club scene. The book is broken into 13 short stories, like the original. Olive is a major character in some of the stories and is a minor part of others. I listened to the book on the Libby app which I download through my local Orange County Library System. All you need is a current library card. The service is free. The narrator, Kimberly Farr, is the same narrator used for Olive Kitteridge, lending to the flow of the series.
The author has such keen observations about aging and family relationships. Olive is still the blunt, impatient character, but the book is able to teach us about compassion through Olive and her circumstances. Some of the stories are full of sadness and other things that happen make one laugh out loud! I’ll be watching closely for the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction that come out in April. Also, I wonder if Olive, Again will be picked up for a miniseries? Are you listening HBO?
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