Amy and Isabelle: A novel

With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the love between a mother and her daughter. Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student in a small mill town, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between understandable fantasy and disturbing reality.

Customer Reviews:

Bittersweet and evocative

By Meredith Branscombe - April 2, 2000

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,... read more

A beautiful book about mother/daughter relationships

By A Customer - June 6, 1999

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!