Amy and Isabelle
Subtitle: a novel
By: Elizabeth Strout.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 303
Subjects: Teenage girls -- Fiction; Single mothers -- Fiction; Illegitimate children -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; High school teachers -- Fiction; Sexual harassment in education -- Fiction; Sexual ethics for teenagers -- Fiction; Sexual consent -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: 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.