Lovely, lovely, lovely. ( )

I haven't read 'My Name is Lucy Barton', but I sense this may not matter. Lucy features in this short story collection, as does her home town and community of Amgash, Illinois. Each story here features someone in the locality, and is at least loosely connected with one of more of the other characters. All of them are in some way damaged and flawed, and that this became something of a theme gave the book a certain greyness, a certain predictability. I've been a week getting round to writing this review, and I find I have little recall of the stories in this book. It's well written: Strout has an eye for the telling detail, and an ear for conversation. But I'm now in no hurry to read 'My Name is Lucy Barton'. ( )

A fine collection of short stories featuring characters mentioned in Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton. Beautifully written and, for me, far more engaging than the novel as the stories are more unexpected and wonderfully varied.
As well as tenderness and humour, Strout can maintain tension in these seemingly simple stories, just because you as a reader are unsure where Strout wants to take you. For example, the final story about Abel Blaine (Lucy Barton’s cousin) should (you think) mirror the goodwill of the play of a Dickensian A Christmas Carol, but in about 30 pages Strout creates multiple ways in which the story might develop. ( )

"The Barton family had been outcasts, even in a town like Amgash, their extreme poverty and strangeness making this so. The oldest child, a man named Pete, lived alone there now, the middle child was two towns away, and the youngest, Lucy Barton, had fled many years ago, and had ended up living in New York City."

Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible is a lovely collection of nine stories revolving around characters mentioned in her novel My Name is Lucy Barton. These interrelated stories are set in the small run-down town of Amgash, Illinois, Lucy Barton’s hometown. Though many of the characters have moved on from Amgash the events in their past have left an indelible mark on their lives and as they recall significant memories they are all taken back to their life in Amgash. Most of the characters will sound familiar on account of them being mentioned in the conversations between Lucy and her mother in the previous novel. Only one of the stories, Sister, features Lucy Barton and her siblings as the main characters but we get to know more about Lucy’s townspeople such as Vietnam War veteran Charlie Macauley ( The Hit-Thumb Theory), the Nicely family (Windmills) and the Mumford family( Mississippi Mary), her school janitor, Tommy Guptill ( The Sign), and her cousins, Abel Blaine (Gift) and Dottie (Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast. As we learn more about the lives, relationships, backstories and struggles of some of the past and present residents of Amgash, each of their stories contributes to a better understanding of Lucy Barton and her story.

Elizabeth Strout’s writing is elegant, her characters are real and relatable and her prose is beautiful and the narrative flows smoothly. The structure and style of this collection are similar to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Though many of these stories are heartbreaking and revolve around unhappy moments and memories, touching upon themes such as poverty, parental neglect, PTSD, infidelity and trauma, the author writes with compassion and a great understanding of human emotions and complex relationships.

I strongly recommend reading My Name is Lucy Barton before this collection of stories to understand how and where these stories connect to Lucy and her story. ( )

It's surprising how some books stick with you. I read My Name is Lucy Barton months ago, but when I picked up this title in the library the mood, created by dialogue and structure, whooshed over me in a blink. So I checked out this companion novel without a second thought.

Strout, however, is all about second thoughts, and third and fourth as well, as she unspools a series of vinettes peopled by characters mentioned, however tangentially, in Lucy Barton. Readers find the ache and horror, tenderness, and surprise that all come with a closer look. About page 42 I thought, "Ah, this is a novel about forgiveness", and on page 54 nodded to myself, "Yes. See."

But it is so much more. Because while so many things can be forgiven as we see more of a person's story, some things are indeed so dreadful, so dislocating, that we can never forget. These short, but rich renderings of deeply human, deeply flawed people reminds us that most everyone is doing their best. But sometimes that best destroys us. ( )