false<![CDATA[Amy and Isabelle: A Novel]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172352544m/167216.jpg16721619"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, <I>Amy and Isabelle</I> 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. <I>--Alix Wilber</I>33568741998Amy and Isabelle: A Noveltotal:1308|5:178|4:459|3:478|2:148|1:45|13084501191122444falsefalseTue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008Mon Nov 12 04:28:33 -0800 2007Sun Jan 20 18:28:56 -0800 2008
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10falsefalseTue Sep 22 00:00:00 -0700 2009Tue Sep 22 16:03:39 -0700 2009Fri Sep 25 18:20:01 -0700 2009 1 1/2 Stars
I did not like this book. At all. And after reading reviews by others here on GoodReads, I have to wonder if I missed something !!) in this book. I didn't see ANY of the same things that they all saw that they deemed the making of this book wonderful. In fact, in ...more...]]>
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50falsefalseMon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009Thu May 28 09:27:01 -0700 2009Fri Jun 05 11:23:58 -0700 2009 I read Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge" earlier this year, because it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award -- my fave award next to the Booke...more...]]>
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30falsefalseSun Jan 04 00:00:00 -0800 2009Thu Dec 25 10:17:16 -0800 2008Sun Jan 04 10:13:45 -0800 2009 I'm adding to this review now that I have finished it. While I still f...more...]]>
50falsefalseWed Nov 18 00:00:00 -0800 2009Mon Oct 19 02:43:18 -0700 2009Wed Nov 18 02:14:05 -0800 2009 The story is about a mother (Isabelle) and daughter(Amy) and how they deal with a crisis in their lives over the course of a few months.
The main characte...more...]]>
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40falsefalseThu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009Mon Jan 05 14:43:46 -0800 2009Sun Jan 11 11:39:43 -0800 2009
Amy and Isabelle is one of the best books I've read in awhile. The pages turned quickly for me and I found the story totally absorbing. The book is set beautifully within the context of the other folks going about living their lives in a small town in Maine which is actually what I loved most about ...more...]]>
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