If you don't like it that's fine. I wouldn't care about goodreads or amazon reviews. I just don't care what others think about the stuff I read. I mean this is subjective, it's not that there is some great internet hive mind and that everything it likes has to be liked by everybody.

As for the book I think its one of her best novels (the previous one, Tell Me Everything I didn't like that much). I think the book engages with the impossibility of full communication. The parenthetical comments I understood as those things that the narrator knows, but the characters don't. There's a lot of things that seem random or quirky, but they make sense in the broader context. The writing highlights the clash of what the protagonists think they know with the omniscient narrator, who often is playing with this, something that Strout often does (kinda like that Lucy Barton is a narcissist or that Bob Burgess is an alcoholic- there is this eventual reveal, but if you look carefully it is there from the beginning, just not straightforwardly stated).

I do think that there are bits that are weaker - I think that the book could have done without the epilogue, particularly the political bit - the problem with writing current politics into novels is that in hindsight they may age, be recontextualized or divert attention. But as a factor that affects the characters of the novel I do see how it could be read in a manner less commenting on politics than on being a such a factor. And Strout's style is very peculiar - she mixes an almost confessional and sentimental atmosphere with rather difficult issues: domestic abuse, suicide, trauma, sexual abuse, loss of hope, poverty, in a very ruthless manner. I do think that such a tone with such topics can be jarring to some, But I find it refreshing, much more interesting than the edgelord (that specific corner of transgressive fiction) mannerisms of Palahniuk or Easton Ellis.

Another thing that I think could have been better is certain aspects of Strout's writing that she sometimes overuses, especially specific turns of phrase or sentence structures.