Amy and Isabelle

Strout, Elizabeth

ISBN 10: 0375501347 / ISBN 13: 9780375501340

Published by Random House (edition First Edition), 1999

About this Item

With dust jacket. The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way.

Seller Inventory # 0375501347-7-1-29

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Amy and Isabelle
• Publisher: Random House (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375501347
• ISBN 13: 9780375501340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fair
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.