Amy and Isabelle

Amy and Isabelle

1998 • 304 pages

Ratings13

Average rating3.4

15

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. 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.


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Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

I made myself finish it just in case it suddenly got better. It didn't.

June 1, 2006

A lovely read. Not my favorite Elizabeth Strout book, but I enjoyed her writing and the lessons of self-acceptance Isabelle learned at the end.

February 2, 2023

Extremely hard to finish this one. Was pretty boring as far as the writing goes and the characters were mediocre at best.

June 22, 2019

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