Amy and Isabelle
Type
Book
Authors
ISBN 10
0375501347
ISBN 13
9780375501340
Category
813 Fiction
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Publication Year
1999
Publisher
Pages
303
Subject
Teenage girls -- Fiction. Single mothers -- Fiction. Illegitimate children -- Fiction.
Tags
Abstract
In a small town in New England, a girl has an affair with her schoolteacher. Amy Goodrow lives with her protective single mother and the novel examines the way the scandal affects their relationship.
Description
Publisher Comments
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. 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Unflaggingly engaging....What a pleasure to gain entry into the world of this book." New Yorker
About the Author
Born in Portland, Maine, Elizabeth Strout now lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. She has been teaching literature and writing at Manhattan Community College for ten years and has also taught writing at the New School. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker.
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. 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Unflaggingly engaging....What a pleasure to gain entry into the world of this book." New Yorker
About the Author
Born in Portland, Maine, Elizabeth Strout now lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. She has been teaching literature and writing at Manhattan Community College for ten years and has also taught writing at the New School. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker.
Biblio Notes
Genre/Form: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Elizabeth Strout
ISBN: 0375501347 9780375501340
OCLC Number: 1031748473
Awards: Short-listed for Orange Prize for Fiction 2000
Description: 303 p. ; 22 cm.
Responsibility: Elizabeth Strout.
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Elizabeth Strout
ISBN: 0375501347 9780375501340
OCLC Number: 1031748473
Awards: Short-listed for Orange Prize for Fiction 2000
Description: 303 p. ; 22 cm.
Responsibility: Elizabeth Strout.
Number of Copies
1
