Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe–as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was and his congregation begins to question his leadership and propriety.
In prose clear and saturated with feeling, Elizabeth Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered–life, love, God, and community, and all is made new by this writer's boundless compassion and graceful prose.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 14, 2006 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781415953501
- File size: 290752 KB
- Duration: 10:05:43
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
A satisfying reading by Bernadette Dunne brings warmth and charm to Elizabeth Strout's uplifting look at one man's struggle with grief. When his wife dies after a lengthy illness, Tyler Caskey, minister to a congregation in West Arnett, Maine, finds himself barely coping. His daughter is out of control at school, and his congregation begins to question his ability to lead. Bernadette Dunne's performance populates the town with people as real as anyone's next-door neighbors. She develops Tyler as a man whose life and belief system at first offer him insufficient solace. As he begins to realize that comfort only comes of helping others, Dunne elevates his awareness to something more than a faith-based cliché. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
October 17, 2005
Strout's satisfying follow-up to her 1999 debut, Amy and Isabel
, follows a recent widower from grief through breakdown to recovery in 1959 smalltown Maine. The father of two young girls and the newly appointed minister of the fictional town of West Annett, Tyler Caskey is quietly devastated by wife Lauren's death following a prolonged illness. Tyler's older daughter Katherine is deeply antisocial at school and at home; his adorable younger daughter Jeannie has been sent to live upstate with Tyler's overbearing mother. Talk begins to spread of Katherine's increasing unsoundness and of Tyler's possible affair with his devoted-though-suspicious housekeeper, Connie Hatch. It's spearheaded by the gossipy Ladies' Aide Society, whose members bear down on Tyler like the dark clouds of a gathering storm. Meanwhile, Tyler's grief shades into an angry, cynical depression, leaving him unable to parent his troubled daughter or minister to his congregation, and putting his job and family at risk. Strout's deadpan, melancholy prose powerfully conveys Tyler's sense of internal confinement. The uplifting ending arrives too easily, but on the whole, Strout has crafted a harrowing meditation of exile on Main Street. -
AudioFile Magazine
Using beautiful prose, Elizabeth Strout tells the story of minister Tyler Caskey and his congregation in a rural New England town. Gerrianne Raphael reads Strout's fluid and candidly human dialogue with a distinct, believable, and appropriate voice-lovable characters sound warm and genuine when speaking while those with shallow hearts appear as such. As events unfold around them, and Tyler and his daughter struggle to find their equilibrium after the death of his wife, Raphael expertly conveys the frustration and despair of the characters. The whole package is well done, with the exception of the abridgment, which wraps up a sticky mess a little too cleanly and quickly. H.L.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
June 5, 2006
In Strout's graceful if languid second novel, set in the cold northern reaches of New England during the Cold War, Tyler Caskey is a young minister tending to the faith of his small, gossipy parish. He's also struggling with the aftermath of his wife's premature death, which has left him with two little girls to raise. What the plot lacks in pace and surprise, Strout makes up for with intelligent, revealing portraits of many characters, and Raphael's versatile voice makes them even more memorable. Her voice shrinks remarkably to speak the lines of Caskey's traumatized older daughter; turns gruff and unhappy for Charles Austin, a church deacon wrestling with his own secret demons; and ratchets up into startlingly cold and imperious territories for Caskey's meddling mother. Raphael deftly switches from the plummy, slightly British-accented voice she uses for most of the narration to speak in the drawn-out, nasal tones of Caskey's plainspoken, friendly housekeeper. Though the abridgment cuts out some of the background story, events are still sometimes drawn out. But fans of such closely observed period pieces will no doubt revel in Strout's evocative prose and in Raphael's richly textured interpretation. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 17).
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