It's true what they say about improving with age. By the time we get to the Third Age, we've been round the block a few times and we get to know where to pick our fights. This is how it is with Olive Kitteridge. The one-time obstructive, argumentative woman gradually settles down into someone who simply speaks her mind and has the courage to confront anyone's elephant in any room she might find it in. We first meet Olive in Elizabeth Strout's earlier novel, Olive Kitteridge, and this book picks up the threads and continues to follow Olive with her friends and family as she grumbles her way into old age. The writing is superb in both novels and knowing how much Olive rubbed everyone up the wrong way in the first book, I was pleasantly surprised at how much empathy I felt for her in this one. As I have entered the foothills of old age myself, there were several moments in the book where I had to stop and think about my own life spanning backwards and f...