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Amy and Isabelle: A novel
by Elizabeth Strout
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Vintage (2000-02-01)
ISBN: 0375705198
EAN: 9780375705199
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Paperback: 320 pages
Release Date: 2000-02-01
SKU: BX035-061130010
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Clean and shiny. Very minor wear, near new. Spine uncreased, pgs crisp, clean, tight, unmarked. No remainder mark.
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Editorial Reviews
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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
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews
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Five stars for these chacterizations
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-06-01
This is a fabulous book in that the author draws one in to the lives of a single mother and her adolescent daughter. The mother's need for a better life, as well as "acceptance" is heartbreaking. The reader will not easily forget the scene where she waits and waits some more for her bank boss's visit. [Reminds one of The Heiress] The daughter's sexual awakening is vivid, and her teacher's taking advantage of this had the power to make this reader fairly furious. This is an extremely well written book! Recommended reading.
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A Typical Mother & Daughter Book ...
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-07-13
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
When I bought this book several years ago, it was the most-talked about book in the online book clubs. I never had a chance to pick it up till recently when it's my goal to get rid of books that have been sitting there for ages. I recall vaguely that I did pick it up at one time and put it back down, looking for something else to read. I had the same feeling this time again, but stuck with it to see if all the four/five stars are warranted. No. Not really.
For one thing, this book is vaguely vulgar ~~ mentioning body habits that may be normal, but do I really need to hear about them? It isn't erotic but more depressing especially the sex scenes in this book are pathetic. Has anyone ever heard of leaving things to the imagination? Why do authors feel compelled to describe every single thing? Anyhow, those are the negatives of this book and in my opinion, doesn't necessarily add to the story, but detract from the story.
This book is about a mother and daughter who live together, who work together and do everything together ~~ how can two people who spend the majority of their lives together know so little about one another? Isabelle carries the secret of her past close to her heart. She also yearns for her boss, a man who caught her daughter in the car with her math teacher, Mr. Robertson. There's Amy, the daughter, who loved the attention of her teacher ... and you know how it goes ~~ turns out the teacher was just using her, and so on. That relationship almost destroyed the relationship she has with her mother.
Yes, there are other townsfolks in this novel, with little bits of their stories scattered throughout the book. There's Dottie, who had an operation and found out her husband was having an affair. There's Fat Bev, who works with Amy and Isabelle. There's a deacon's wife who is having an affair with the college psychologist. There's Amy's best friend who got pregnant with her boyfriend's child. There's even a case of a missing little girl, who was kidnapped in the middle of the afternoon from her house. All this are tied in together to show that life continues.
If you like these kinds of books ~~ then this one is for you. But after reading dozens of books on this same theme, there are others out there that are much better and more gratifying. This one seems to have fallen short of the mark ~~ which is too bad because I have heard great things about this author.
7-13-07
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Yup, a mother and a daughter.
Rating (3)
Date: 2006-09-12
1 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Sure, a story about a mother and her daughter. The tangible relationship is not so hard to imagine as a daughter myself, however, the downside of the story, was not so much the story but the writing itself.
The story seemed dry, but I think it was the style as some of the characters I grew to love despite their descriptions and scense.
I am wondering if the movie, with Elizabeth Shue, would have been a bettet choice with my time...
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Lives of Desperate Fantasy (4.3 *s)
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-10-23
9 out of 11 customers found this reveiw helpful
Strout has written a riveting and distressing story of the tortured mother-daughter relationship of single mother Isabelle and teenage daughter Amy and more generally of life in a small mill town in New England, with its obvious social pecking order. The story is anchored in the interactions among the working class women working in the mill office, where Isabelle is the secretary to the manager. The extreme heat and dryness of this particular summer seem to have created a climate conducive for the unsettling events that occurred that summer.
Isabelle leads a desperate and lonely existence with her daughter on the outskirts of town. Isabelle has not only constructed a fictitious past, but also is fanatical about her perceived image while imaging a relationship with her boss, despite no demonstrated interest on his part. This ingenuousness creates an unfocused contempt by Amy for her mother. Amy is so desperate for a dose of reality in her life that she is taken in by the kindness and wisdom of a new math teacher at school.
The pace of the book is as slow as the nearly dried up river running down the center of the town which the author uses to great advantage in her ample descriptions of the town and allowing her characters to establish themselves. Though this well-written book is disturbing, the events of the summer do allow Isabelle and Amy to begin moving beyond their personal and mother-daughter limitations.
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An interesting examination of a mother/daughter relationship
Rating (3)
Date: 2005-09-05
5 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
A story about a mother-daughter relationship and some weird and jarring things that happen to change their relationship. I found it interesting enough to finish (which isn't always the case). While I can't say it was stupendous, I can say it was very down to earth and really got into the characters minds to the point where you could believe what they believe and want what they wanted, even when it was coming from an obviously skewed point of view.
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