Jan 8

Jan 8 Anything Is Possible

Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher:
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.

TL;DR Review

Elizabeth Strout has done it again. Anything Is Possible is a beautiful and tender of a portrait of a community told through the eyes of its people, one story at a time.

For you if: You like linked short stories and rich characters.

Full Review

I haven’t read all of her backlist yet, but I still feel like I can say that Elizabeth Strout is at her best writing books just like this: short stories about different people in the same town. It’s what made Olive Kitteridge the success it was, and it’s what makes this one sparkle with life and squeeze your heart in the absolute best way.

Anything Is Possible s a sort of sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton. It introduces us to many of the people in Lucy’s remote hometown of Amgash, Illinois, through nine linked short stories. Lucy is mentioned throughout, as she’s just published a memoir, and she makes an appearance in one of them, told through her brother’s perspective. She’s a link between these characters, but she’s not the star of the show: they are, and to a possibly even greater extent, Amgash itself is.

I have no idea how Elizabeth Strout manages to write characters that could just walk off the page, fully formed. But it might be even more impressive how she’s able to use them to paint a much larger picture of a place and its community. Each of these characters’ stories broke my heart — their lives have not been easy, and it made some of them more tender and some of them harder. There is pain, humor, and love in these pages that really sticks with you.

I’m excited to go back to Amgash with Oh, William! next month!