“The sense of community that pervades Strout’s writing feels even more expansive when her novels converge, when the various Maines she has depicted with exquisite specificity turn out to be the same. It’s as if Strout is telling her readers that her mission in writing these books has been singular: to portray in luminous detail the messy, secretive, consequential lives of people in a small town.”
Jonathan Vatner, “Aging Gently, Messily: On Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive, Again’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 16, 2019.