Tell Me Everything
(AMGASH #5)
By Elizabeth Strout
Published Year: 10 September 2024
Page Count: 300 pages
Medium Used: Kindle PW
Genre : Contemporary Fiction, Drama, Murder Mystery, 2024-read.
Rating : 4/5
The prose is so good and comforting. I couldn't put this book away for long. I picked the book because it is a recent release and the title felt immersive. Few pages into the book, I realized, that most of the characters have long histories and this is a book (5th!!) in a series. But I read it anyway and it could be read as a standalone as well.. only we will not have a complete picture of all the people and their interrelationships.
The three main characters are Olive Kittredge, Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess. There are multiple books each with these as the main characters, drawing up to this one. (I should check them out. I love the author already!) So, in this book, Bob Burgess and Lucy Barton are close friends and Bob nurses a secret crush on Lucy - despite being married, happily to Margaret. Bob and Lucy go for frequent walks during which Bob smokes in secret and they talk a lot. They tell each other everything that is relevant and also irrelevant to them. Lucy also visits Olive occasionally to tell her some stories and listen, sometimes, to the stories Olive has to tell. These stories usually contain someone who is a victim to the horrors 'life' plays at. Lucy asks some rich and quintessential questions like what is the meaning to life, what adds meaning to it and if there is a divine personality who is watching over everything. Though the author provides no concrete answer to these questions(because, really, who can?), I felt what she had to say was enough on the topics.
I also liked the ex wife and brother of Bob - his family feels like family to the reader too - how wonderful is this ! The homicide and suicide case that Bob has to deal with added to the drama. I just didn't understand if the author was sort of obsessing in this book about child abuse by parent figures .. because it has cropped up multiple times and also if she is sort of linking up the abuse a parent feels to that their child might later experience. Its a good food for thought. Does a child attract similar abuse to the one its parent faced in her/his childhood?
Crosby, Maine is a cozy, comfortable town where everyone knows everyone else. If something big like a murder or birthday or wedding takes place, everyone is there to take part in it. I like such places where anonymity is practically absent.
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