Looking at YouTube videos of the best books of 2022 from various reviewers, I found this one mentioned as one of the post pandemic themed reads. I'd read the author's Olive Kitteridge back in 2008 and enjoyed it. Her books connect her characters across the stories, Olive playing a minor role in this one.
Lucy, her main character was not someone I liked very much. She's 60ish and recently widowed from her second husband. She's an insipid worrier that I thought might be experiencing the beginnings of dementia. The story is told from her point of view, where her first husband, a scientist, insists she and their daughters leave New York as the pandemic hits, taking off for Maine, hence the title.
It's a painfully reminiscent chronicling of our lives during Covid-19 and there are recognizable reactions to our real life experiences during its scourge. Her reflective, passive acceptance of what has happened in her life and what happens during their time in isolation is in contrast to the reactions of those surrounding her.
In the end I found the story soothing and comforting, a looking back on what some have survived. I appreciated the story's handling of our fears and doubts and the changes it as wrought on our ourselves, our families and our lives.
Quotes:
"I had often thought before: that there had been a last time--when they were little--that I had picked up the girls. This had broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child."
"My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life. In my whole life. I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been. But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said."
"Because I would never have had an affair, I thought William would not either. I had been thinking like myself."
Published: 2000 Read: Jan 2023 Genre: Fiction
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