Name: Amy and Isabelle
Rating: 3.75 (20 reviews)
ISBN: 9781568957289

Elizabeth Strout

Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between understandable fantasy and disturbing reality. When discovered, their relationship brings disgrace to Amy's mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame she feels for her own past. In a fury, she lashes out at her daughter's beauty and then retreats into outraged silence. Mother and daughter remain at a distance. This conflict is surrounded by other 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.

Amy and Isabelle

Lindy

No, you couldn't blame these things on God. It was people, just ordinary, regular people, who did this to each other. People ruined other people's lives.

People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

All the love in the world couldn't prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.

When Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student, falls in love with her math teacher, the love affair threatens the intimate relationship between Amy and her mother, Isabelle, whose feelings are influenced by the shame of her own past. A first novel. 100,000 first printing. Reprint.

Maybe some lessons are meant to be learnt

Josh Clement

I liked the descriptions of shyness, north east America and a complicated mother/daughter relationship. However, I couldn't connect with any of the characters so I felt stuck at the surface level, like I had started watching a daytime soap halfway through.

Explores the dark secret that jeopardizes the love between a mother and her daughter in a small mill town.

A Novel

Suzanne C.

Megan Bates

Jen Murphy

Allison Garber

💒lara

Martha F.

Yasmin

Nikolina Marković

Michael Springer

Victoria

From the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton ? Isabelle Goodrow has been living in self-imposed exile with her daughter Amy for fifteen years. Shamed by her past and her affair with Amy's father, she has submerged herself in the routine of her dead-end job and her unrequited love for her boss. But when Amy, frustrated by her quiet and unemotional mother, embarks on an illicit affair with her maths teacher, the disgrace intensifies the shame Isabelle feels about her own past. Throughout one long, sweltering summer, as the events of the small town ebb and flow around them, Amy and Isabelle exist in silent conflict until a final act leads ultimately to the understanding they both crave.

Amy and Isabelle

Reviews

Highlights