My Goodreads and Amazon reviews of Tell Me Everything: A Novel by Elizabeth Strout (Rated 5) – Tell Me More. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout brings together the characters she’s introduced readers to in her previous novels. In this volume, Bob Burgess is the center who draws the others into his orbit, but each has untold stories of their own to relate. Individually, these “unrecorded lives” have often been challenging, even painful, yet they are not extraordinary within the panoply of human experience. Likewise, the events and emotions they share when their lives are entangled in Strout’s latest book are unexceptionable. Except that in this author’s capable hands, each story acquires the depth, radiance, or tragedy that elevates it to a level worth telling and remembering. As a novelist myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Strout’s gentle but firm control as she navigates the bumpy terrain her characters traverse. Their small worlds are big enough to accommodate us all. I didn’t want the book to end, and impatiently await Strout’s next book so she can tell me more.
Stories worth listening to, told by a masterful writer
Why writers read: “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham
