Book Review: Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: April 25, 2017
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s 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.

Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.

Anything is Possible was my book club’s July selection. It’s not quite a short-story collection but not quite a novel either. Each chapter is a vignette focusing on a different person. All of the main characters in each chapter are connected to the main characters of the other stories in some way – some more closely than others. A couple of people in my book club had trouble keeping track of the relationships between the characters but I didn’t find it to be a problem.

Lucy Barton, the main character of Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton, is mentioned in a few of the stories in this book and she is a character in one of them. However, this book is not a sequel to that book. I haven’t read that book and it didn’t seem to matter much in reading this one. Others in my book club who had read My Name is Lucy Barton agreed that it was not necessary. However, some of the other reviews I’ve read of this book indicate that you will enjoy Anything is Possible even more if you have read My Name is Lucy Barton.

These stories in this book are melancholy, yet hopeful and filled with likeable and sympathetic characters. It’s slow paced and mostly just a slice of life for each character. Even so, I enjoyed it along with most of the members of my book club.