My Tuesday Teaser on Crazy Lady will have to do, instead of the promised review because I visited my friend in her nursing home and picked up about eight Nicholas Sparks’ novels for my Little Free Library.  Vivian is 90 and very alert, not to mention entertaining. I had Crazy Lady,  a junior high book with me, and as I told her about it, she said she’d like to read it, “especially since it was such a nice thin book.” Two other residents asked to read Crazy Lady next, so the book has a new home.

I have worked with first-grade bilingual students all week, reading and writing “color poems” from Hailstones and Halibut Bones.  The teacher became the most excited person there and found she would read and do rhythm in Spanish Very well.

Moving to an adult “venue,” My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, one of my favorite contemporary novelists, has been waiting patiently for me to tell PWR readers how much I enjoyed it. Lucy my was published back in 2016 when I first started PWR , and I probably read it within a year of that time. It is such a memorable book, however, that it remains fresh in my mind.

Strout’s novel reveals and unspools in a way that captivated me as a reader, describing Lucy’s “escape from her troubled family.” As the novel progresses, Lucy turns a “strange” hospital extended-stay into “fodder” for her writing career, and in consequence, ends her marriage. At the beginning of the novel, there is a “strange” visit from her mother, which leaves the reader to muse on the “strange” relationship the two women have. The reader desperately wants to read more.

I had already read Olive Kitteridge and Modern Lovers when I started Lucy Barton. All three novels sounded familiar somehow, and then I realized I had read excerpts of them in The New Yorker when they were published as short stories. Various themes that pop up in Lucy are ones that Strout has dealt with before: “How incompletely we know each other, and how desperately hard every person in the world [works] to get what they need.” As in many of her novels, she deals with my favorite of her themes, “the redemptive power in ‘little things.’” Strout is a gifted novelist who is rapidly becoming my go-to author for a darned good read.  I rate it five out of five!