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ISBN: 9781400067695
Availability: Out of Print
Published: Random House - January 12th, 2016
Bookseller: Catherine
Title: My Name is Lucy Barton
Comments:
As a big fan of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge I had high hopes for her new novel. I am happy to report that My Name is Lucy Barton, did not disappoint! The novel is a love story between a mother who is visiting her daughter in the hospital, a daughter from whom she has been estranged for years. The love between them is fierce, animalistic and not always pretty. We learn that as a child Lucy was struck by both her parents, and had been locked up in a truck for hours when her parents left the house. When Lucy recalls the bitter cold which numbed her bones as a child during the winter months I felt chilled myself.
We meet Lucy when she is grown up, lives in New York City and many years have passed since her childhood in Amgash, Illinois, where she grew up in abject poverty. Social status is not a topic that Americans are comfortable discussing openly and this fact helps the reader feel the discomfort that haunts Lucy in the new life she has created in the big city.
Lucy’s incommunicable isolation makes sense to us, the readers, and we have compassion for Lucy who, although she looks the part of a big city wife, mother and author, feels she does not belong.
When her mother appears at her hospital bedside, Lucy’s relief and love are tangible. The topics of their conversations are surface level but the bond between them, which neither woman is able to articulate, is deep.
There is a rare wealth of emotion in this book, from darkest suffering to pure and simple joy.