RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOlive Kitteridge did not want for a sequel, but the result — charming, amusing, and consistently surprising — is a follow-up worthy of the original ... as usual in Strout’s stories, the craft is virtuosic and often risky ... Surprises wing in but always make a crazy kind of sense. Family secrets, sexual and violent, emerge in moments of wild intensity ... But the prose in Olive, Again is more relaxed than the firecracker descriptions, finely tuned ellipses, and whip-smart banter of its predecessor. It’s a more peaceful novel, recounting more aftermath than crisis ... the reader is granted a new intimacy with [Olive] ... But sometimes her frank introspection creeps past the edge of credibility. The Olive of Olive Kitteridge blamed others for her shortcomings. This Olive is almost masochistic in her ability to flay herself ... The sense of community that pervades Strout’s writing feels even more expansive when her novels converge, when the various Maines she has depicted with exquisite specificity turn out to be the same. It’s as if Strout is telling her readers that her mission in writing these books has been singular: to portray in luminous detail the messy, secretive, consequential lives of people in a small town.
