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Amy And Isabelle - Elizabeth Strout
Amy And Isabelle
by: (author)
4.00 5
"It was terribly hot the summer Mr. Robertson left town." For Amy Goodrow and her mother, Isabelle, the heat of that summer is the least of their problems. Other citizens in the New England mill town of Shirley Falls are bothered by the heat and by "other things too: Further up the river crops... show more
"It was terribly hot the summer Mr. Robertson left town." For Amy Goodrow and her mother, Isabelle, the heat of that summer is the least of their problems. Other citizens in the New England mill town of Shirley Falls are bothered by the heat and by "other things too: Further up the river crops weren't right--pole beans were small, shrivelled on the vine, carrots stopped growing when they were no bigger than the fingers of a child; and two UFOs had apparently been sighted in the north of the state." But Amy and Isabelle have a more private misery: a seemingly unbridgeable chasm has opened between this once-close mother and daughter and nothing will ever be the same again. For Amy has fallen in love with her high-school maths teacher, Mr. Robertson, who has gone way beyond the bounds of propriety by encouraging the crush. When Isabelle finds out, she is horrified to realise that her anger at him is dwarfed by her rage at her own daughter for "enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man while she herself had not." Mother-daughter novels can, by virtue of their subject matter, often seem claustrophobic, a little overwrought; Elizabeth Strout masterfully avoids this problem by placing Amy and Isabelle in the larger context of the community they inhabit. Though her main focus is on the Goodrow women, Strout often detours into the lives and thoughts of her many secondary characters: Isabelle's coworkers Dottie Brown and Fat Bev; Amy's best friend, Stacy Burrows; Stacy's ex-boyfriend, Paul Bellows; and women from Isabelle's church such as Peg Dunlap and Barbara Rawley. She also introduces a chilling frisson of menace with the unsolved abduction of a12-year-old girl and a mysterious obscene phone caller. Like the best of Alice Hoffman, Amy and Isabelle offers up a moving yet resolutely unsentimental portrait of people coming to terms with their lives, finding unsuspected nobility in themselves and unexpected kindness in others along the way. Elizabeth Strout has written a gem of a novel. --Alix Wilber
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ISBN: 9780743467926 (0743467922)
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Merle
Merle rated it
3.5 Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
This is a well-written story of a single mother (Isabelle) and her teenage daughter (Amy), set in 1970's Maine. Unlike most books of this type, this is a literary rather than a sentimental novel, though the subject matter is familiar: Isabelle's frustration with the limitations of her life, Amy's bu...
Merle
Merle rated it
3.0 Amy and Isabelle
This is a well-written story of a single mother (Isabelle) and her teenage daughter (Amy), set in 1970's Maine. Unlike most books of this type, this is a literary rather than a sentimental novel, though the subject matter is familiar: Isabelle's frustration with the limitations of her life, Amy's bu...
good english
good english rated it
What a thoroughly depressing book. Elizabeth Strout is competent and some descriptions in the novel were perfect, so it isn't that it's badly written, just oh my god I never want to read this again. I'm sure I'm supposed to get a message of hope and find that friendship comes from the corners you le...
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