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Guests | October 15, 2009

Michelle Wildgen: IMG A Few Initial and Not-Comprehensive Meditations on Group Novels



I am a sucker for a book about a group. What reminded me of this was Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age, her homage to Mary McCarthy's endlessly re-readable... Continue »

Amy and Isabelle

by Elizabeth Strout

Amy and Isabelle Cover

ISBN13: 9780375501340
ISBN10: 0375501347
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
All Product Details

Only 1 left in stock at $6.95!

Synopses & Reviews

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:

"A novel of shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life."
--Alice Munro

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.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780375501340
Author:
Strout, Elizabeth
Publisher:
Random House Trade
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Mothers and daughters
Subject:
Psychological
Subject:
Teenage girls
Subject:
New England Fiction.
Subject:
Sexual consent -- New England -- Fiction.
Copyright:
Edition Number:
1st ed.
Publication Date:
January 1999
Binding:
Trade Cloth
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
304
Dimensions:
9.57x6.63x1.12 in. 1.35 lbs.

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