Amy and Isabelle: A novel [Paperback]

Elizabeth Strout (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 1, 2000

National Bestseller

In her stunning first novel, Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother—and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. And eating, sleeping, and working side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls doesn't help matters. But when Amy is discovered behind the steamed-up windows of a car with her math teacher, the vast and icy distance between mother and daughter becomes unbridgeable.

As news of the scandal reaches every ear, it is Isabelle who suffers from the harsh judgment of Shirley Falls, intensifying her shame about her own secret past. And as Amy seeks comfort elsewhere, she discovers the fragility of human happiness through other dramas, from the horror of a missing child to the trials of Fat Bev, the community peacemaker. Witty and often profound, Amy and Isabelle confirms Elizabeth Strout as a powerful new talent.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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, shriveled 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 math teacher, Mr. Robertson, who has gone way beyond the bounds of propriety by encouraging the crush. When Isabelle finds out, she is horrified to realize 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 a 12-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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

YA-Isabelle Goodrow thought her move to the small mill town of Shirley Falls would be temporary-just until she decided in which direction she wanted her life to head. Now her daughter, Amy, has fallen in love with her high school math teacher, and he takes advantage of the teen's infatuation. When the relationship is discovered, Isabelle is furious with her daughter but also a little jealous that Amy has found sexual fulfillment while she has not. As mother and daughter try to rebuild the trust and closeness they once shared, the private secrets of many citizens of Shirley Falls are revealed. YAs will relate to the complexities of mother/daughter relationships and to having a crush on a teacher. This is a beautifully written novel with characters so real that readers will miss them at the book's resolute ending. Their interactions are riveting.
Katherine Fitch, Rachel Carson Middle School, Herndon, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 303 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (February 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375705198
• ISBN-13: 978-0375705199
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (218 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#95 Overall (See top 100 authors)

#6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#6 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction

#73 in Books > Literature & Fiction

#88 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction

#6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#6 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction

#73 in Books > Literature & Fiction

#88 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 112 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Bittersweet and evocative April 2, 2000

By Meredith Branscombe

Format: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.

60 of 66 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A DEBUT TO BE ADMIRED AND SAVORED December 28, 2000

By Gail Cooke HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format: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.

36 of 39 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

Format:Hardcover

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!