Olive, again, by Elizabeth Strout

What a delight to come across the story Motherless child in the New Yorker a few months back and discover that Strout had returned to her best-known character, Olive Kitteredge.  I couldn’t say “most-beloved,” because Olive is a decidedly hard person to love, or even like for that matter.  Flinty as the Maine coast, abrupt, without social graces, but somehow she speaks to us. This baker’s dozen of new stories, some centering on Olive and others with her as a peripheral character, picks up where the previous novel left off.  She’s 86 by the end of the book and amazed to realize she really will die someday, probably soon.  Yet she continues on.  We won’t see her like again soon.  A worthy successor to the Pulitzer Prize winning early book.  289 pp.