91 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bittersweet and evocative, April 2, 2000
This review is from: Amy and Isabelle: A novel (Paperback)
If you're looking for a Movie of the Week book, or a Jerry Springer-type mother-daughter turmoil book, look elsewhere. Although there is a disquieting edge of menace in Amy and Isabelle, including a murder and an unethical teacher, it's not an action story and it's not overwrought or overdone.
This is a story about the secrets we keep from ourselves and others, about the fictions we create and believe -- sincerely or otherwise -- to protect our images and illusions in others' eyes. In quiet, lucid prose, Strout captures the hesitating, awkward moments of friendship, crushes, life at work and at home. The changes undergone by the characters are mostly subtle, but rewarding.
Our book club argued over this book for hours -- but even those who found one of the characters maddening and prim had to admit that the book truly captured the ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship: those moments when love, embarrassment, fear, anger all exist at once. Ultimately, it's about the freedom and power gained when one finally accepts oneself, one's mistakes and the things we actually did right. Which makes it sound a lot more trite than it is. Read it.
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53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A DEBUT TO BE ADMIRED AND SAVORED, December 28, 2000
This review is from: Amy and Isabelle: A novel (Paperback)
With Amy and Isabelle, a compellingly told mother/daughter tale, Elizabeth Strout makes her literary debut. We can only hope there are many encores for this first-time novelist who relates her story with resonant assurance. When this is coupled with Ms. Strout's balanced compassion for her characters and her sharp eye for the precise telling detail, Amy and Isabelle becomes a work to be admired and savored.
Isabelle Goodrow and her 16-year-old daughter, Amy, make their home in a small New England mill town, Shirley Falls. This is a lugubrious community where in the hot summer that Amy turns 16 and comes to dislike the sight of her mother, the river is "just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town."
Their rented house is in an area called the Basin, where many blue collar workers live. Isabelle, a tentative woman who wears her hair in a flat French twist and works in the office room of the mill, would never dream of buying that house because she "could not bear to stop thinking that her real life would happen somewhere else."
Hers was a solitary existence, save for Amy. Isabelle is aloof and easily wounded, hurt when the deacon's wife disapproves of the leaves Isabelle had used to decorate the church altar. And, she is proper, always sitting toward the rear of the sanctuary as her mother had taught her to do. This propriety, blended with Isabelle's innate fastidiousness made Amy's illegitimacy even more of a shameful secret.
Amy, too, was reserved. She had but one friend, Stacy, with whom she shared cigarettes, candy bars, and confidences during school lunch hours. A good student with a love for poetry, Amy had long golden hair and a slim well-developed body which made her all the more self-conscious. During classes she would duck her head down, hiding her face behind her hair.
When a substitute teacher, Mr. Robertson, teases her saying, "Come on out, Amy Goodrow, everyone's been asking about you," there is little indication of how Amy will respond.
Yet respond she does as first she is puzzled and then exultant in the burgeoning sexuality that Mr. Robertson coaxes from her. They are, of course, discovered.
The forced awareness of Amy's duplicity and also of her emerging womanhood is a devastating blow to Isabelle, who feels she has spent her life for naught. In fact, Isabelle feels as though she has died: "Her `life' went on. But she felt little connection to anything, except for the queasiness of panic and grief."
And Amy, too, feels betrayed as she realizes that Mr. Robertson has used rather than cared for her. ".....ever since she found his number disconnected, found out that he had gone away; she could not stop her inner trembling."
With Amy and Isabelle Ms. Strout has proven herself to be a considerably gifted writer. She has drawn vividly erotic scenes, and deftly limned some of life's most tender moments. There is every indication that she well understands and cares deeply for the characters she has created.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful book about mother/daughter relationships, June 6, 1999
By A Customer
On the surface, the lives of Isabelle and Amy appear mundane. But the author, Elizabeth Strout, makes us care deeply about this mother and daughter as well as many of the other seemingly uninteresting characters who people this small New England mill town. Until the summer in which this story takes place, Isabelle and Amy exist in a world of their own, not really belonging to any social group within their town. But the same incident that causes a traumatic rift in their relationship, finally enables them to connect with these other individuals as well as to truly understand and accept each other for the first time. Strout's ability to climb into her characters' minds, understanding their longings and fears, is just extraordinary. She treats all her characters (her female characters, anyway) with great compassion and understanding. The character of Fat Bev was a particular standout. Run, don't walk, to buy this book!
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