Reviews
Praise for Elizabeth Strout "Strout has a magnificent gift for humanizing characters." --San Francisco Chronicle "What truly makes Strout exceptional . . . is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling." --Chicago Tribune "[Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion." --USA Today "Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force." --The New Yorker "[Strout's] themes are how incompletely we know one another, how 'desperately hard every person in the world [is] working to get what they need,' and the redemptive power in little things--a shared memory, a shock of tulips." -- People, "There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to--'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy'--simple joy." --Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review "Spectacular . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times." --Lily King, The Washington Post " My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds. . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one." --Marion Winik, Newsday " Lucy Barton is . . . potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ache of loneliness we all feel sometimes." -- Time "An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion." -- People "A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words." -- The Boston Globe "Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . Strout captures the pull between the ruthlessness required to write without restraint and the necessity of accepting others' flaws. It is Lucy's gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother's shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton --like all of Strout's fiction--is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Strout maps the complex terrain of human relationships by focusing on that which is often unspoken and only implied. . . . [ My Name Is Lucy Barton is] a powerful addition to Strout's body of work." -- The Seattle Times "Impressionistic and haunting . . . Much of the joy of reading Lucy Barton comes from piecing together the hints and half-revelations in Strout's unsentimental but compelling prose, especially as you begin to grasp the nature of a bond in which everything important is left unsaid. . . . Strout paints an indelible, grueling portrait of poverty and abuse that's all the more unnerving for her reticence. With My Name Is Lucy Barton, she reminds us of the power of our stories--and our ability to transcend our troubled narratives." -- Miami Herald "Lovely and heartbreaking . . . a major work in minimalist form . . . In the character of Lucy, Strout has fashioned one of the great resilient modern heroines." -- Portland Press-Herald "Strout has proven once again that she is a master of creating unforgettable characters. . . . Her stories open themselves to the reader in a way that is familiar and relatable, but then she delivers these zingers and we marvel at her talent." -- The Post and Courier "Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue." --Hilary Mantel "Magnificent." --Ann Patchett
