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Amgash Series #2
by Elizabeth Strout
Book Reviewed by:An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.
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.
Strout's characters struggle: with infidelity, bullying, post-traumatic stress disorder, isolation, poverty, abuse and more. But despite all this, the tone of the book is as optimistic as its title suggests. What Anything is Possible lacks, however, is a strong unifying character to tie all its disparate strands together, in the way that Olive Kitteridge did...continued
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(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a central theme in Elizabeth Strout's novel Anything is Possible, a condition clearly experienced by Vietnam vet, Charlie Macauley, but also by other characters. Returning to Amgash, the scene of her abusive childhood, causes Lucy Barton to have a full-blown panic attack. Lucy's parents may also have suffered from PTSD – her father as a result of service in World War II, and her mother from her own abusive family background, suggested in Strout's previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, when Lucy's mother cannot touch her own daughter and explains that growing up she never slept but only catnapped.
PTSD was first officially recognized as a health condition in 1980, five years after the end of...
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If you liked Anything Is Possible, try these:
by Elizabeth Strout
Published 2020
Winner of the 2019 BookBrowse Fiction Award
Prickly, wry, resistant to change yet ruthlessly honest and deeply empathetic, Olive Kitteridge is "a compelling life force" (San Francisco Chronicle).
by Anne Tyler
Published 2019
A delightful novel of one woman's transformative journey, from the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
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