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Manhattan beach egan summary5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() Her father died by self-inflicted gunshot wound, her platonic lover in a car accident, and she rages at her husband, Henry, and son, Christopher. Olive Kitteridge is a gorgeous 2008 novel in stories (and a stellar HBO miniseries) that depicts the life of a woman whose deep humanity is often occluded by her pain. Just as in Updike’s Rabbit series, a change in time changes everything. Olive has aged, and she, along with the residents of the fictional seaside hamlet of Crosby, Maine, are grappling with a changed world. Olive Kitteridge did not want for a sequel, but the result - charming, amusing, and consistently surprising - is a follow-up worthy of the original. “I really thought I was done with her, and she with me.” Then one day, while Strout sat in a European café, her difficult, lovable character roared back to life. “I never intended to return to Olive Kitteridge,” Elizabeth Strout said in a recent interview with The New Yorker. ![]() Such is the case with Olive Kitteridge, the namesake of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, and now the central character of Olive, Again. But sometimes a character so compels the author and readers worldwide that she practically demands to be written about again. A second book may rob readers of the pleasure of imagination, thus undoing some of the magic of the original novel. There’s a risk in returning to characters whose arcs have been resolved or purposely left in ambiguity. ![]()
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