“Lucy by the Sea” by Elizabeth Strout Review

General Information:

Format Read – Audiobook

 

GoodReads Choice Awards – 2022 Fiction Nominee

 

Synopsis – Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William decide to leave New York City and head up to Maine to wait out the pandemic over the next few months, learning what it means to be isolated and how to look at all the positives that life has to offer.

 

Review:

Another book I picked up on my quest to read all of the GoodReads Choice Awards nominees, I am not surprised that we had another one that focused on the pandemic.  I feel as though we are going to be getting a lot more of these kinds of stories that focus on either the actual pandemic that took place in 2020 or stories having themes of a disease or pandemic (like in “To Paradise”).  While I think that a lot of these authors found a creative outlet in writing about what was going on, it can begin to feel repetitive, especially when you are doing a challenge like myself where a lot of these types of books are getting published around the same time.

 

I did not know that this story was the fourth in a series going into it, but I did not find any issue jumping into the story without having the appropriate background knowledge of who the characters were.  I really like that about a story that may be a part of a literary fiction series but you do not need previous books to catch up.  I bet if I had read the three former books –  which I do plan on reading now – I would probably have more information on the relationship between Lucy and William with their children and their relationships, but I felt as though I knew enough about them from what I was given in this novel to know what was going on.  That means a lot to someone like me who is new to reading adult literary fiction and gives me confidence in the series as a whole.

 

Overall, I think the book was just pretty average.  There was nothing that took me out of the story too much that made it hard to get through but also there did not seem to be a lot of uniqueness or creativity that made it an absolutely amazing read.  The main idea behind the story was something that I have gotten a lot of recently with pandemic-focused books, but I also took a lot away from it and was something I needed to hear during the time I was listening to it.  The characters had their own unique personalities but nothing too different that separated them from the average family going through this time like everyone else.  I enjoyed a lot of parts of the book with Lucy just contemplating the simple things in life that she had not noticed before.  Going through an event like the pandemic changed a lot of people; they were more focused on the little things that happened every day in their lives as they were missing them.  The basics of seeing someone cross your path or people watching as individuals do their jobs became such a rarity during 2020 that hearing what Stout had to say about them through Lucy made it all worth it.  Those were some of the best aspects of the book and the reason why I was able to enjoy it the way I did.

 

Overall, there is nothing too different about an average family set during the pandemic, but when you think back and listen to Lucy explain the simple things in life, it makes the novel all worth it.