Lucy by the Sea By Elizabeth Strout Read by Kimberly Farr.

Thank you @PRHAudio for the complimentary audiobook!

“It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us.”

Lucy by the Sea by Pulitzer prize winning author Elizabeth Strout is a thoughtful and interesting story. It is the fourth book in the series, but I was able to listen and not feel like I was lost. We follow Lucy as she leaves New York City to reside in Maine with her divorced husband at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The story is told from Lucy’s perspective.

I found myself very engrossed in the story. It was interesting to walk through the pandemic again with someone who was seeing it unfold. Lucy is a contemplative character who has so much compassion for the people around her. She has had challenges in her life, and she has used them to become a better person. She is a writer by trade and I found her fascinating. I felt like I was sitting down with an old friend as they shared about their life with me.

“When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, that is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger”

This is one of those stories that will stay with me for a long time. It shared the pandemic in an interesting way, the characters had so much depth and were very relatable, and the compassion demonstrated by Lucy touched my heart deeply. I highly recommend Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Stout and read by Kimberly Farr.  

I was given a copy of the audiobook but not required to write a positive review. 

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summer months of her childhood she played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine, and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.

During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, and was already studying – on her own – the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; by the age of sixteen was sending out stories to magazines. Her first story was published when she was twenty-six.

Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services, before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. By this time she was publishing more stories in literary magazines and Redbook and Seventeen. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing.