Book Description
With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and
Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize
the lovebetween 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. When
discovered, this emotional and physical trespass brings
disgrace to Amy's mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame
she feels about her own past. In a fury, she lashes out at
her daughter's beauty and then retreats into outraged
silence. Amy withdraws, too, and mother and daughter eat,
sleep, and even work side by side but remain at a vast,
seemingly unbridgeable distance from each other.
This conflict is surrounded by other large and small dramas
in the town of Shirley Falls--a teenage pregnancy, a UFO
sighting, a missing child, and the trials of Fat Bev, the
community's enormous (and enormously funny and compassionate)
peacemaker and amateur medical consultant. Keeping Isabelle
and Amy as the main focus of her sharp, sympathetic eye,
Elizabeth Strout attends to them all. As she does so, she
reveals not only her deep affection for her characters, both
serious and comic, but her profound wisdom about the human
condition in general. She makes us care about these
extraordinary ordinary people and makes us hope that they
will find a way out of their often self-imposed emotional
exile.
