Horrified by her daughter's actions, Isabelle commits an act that they later regret, igniting the hostile silence throughout the summer. But Isabelle has no idea Amy is seeing her teacher until they are discovered.Īmy's deceit makes Isabelle, a single mother, question her own parenting skills, remembering her own lies that began when she first moved to Shirley Falls when Amy was a baby. Throughout the spring, Isabelle notices a pleasant change in her daughter and hopes the girl is coming out of her shell. Robertson offers Amy a ride home so she can avoid having to trudge through the muddy slush-a ride leading to many others. Sharing after school talks about poetry and life, Mr.

Told in a series of flashbacks, the trouble begins when a young, enthusiastic Mr. The novel opens with Amy beginning her summer job at her mother's work place, the mill.

That summer in Shirley Falls, a small New England town, seems relentless filled with the heat, the noxious sulfur odor of the river, and the strained vow of silence between Amy and Isabelle. When Amy, a shy 16-year-old, has an affair with her high-school math teacher, she threatens the strong relationship with her mother Isabelle, forcing them to question the boundaries of their love.

There is no doubting the central point - ”All the love in the world couldn’t prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were” - but in Strout’s sure hands, that truth isn’t awful but, in fact, revelatory.The delicate relationship between mothers and daughters full of love and anger, often simultaneously, is the subject of Elizabeth Strout's stunning first novel, Amy and Isabelle. Ultimately, the secrets aren’t hard to guess, nor are they particularly original it’s the affecting portrayal of the ties between mother and daughter, along with the sympathetically drawn characters, that make the book stand out. Amy’s secret belongs to her recent past, the school year gone by, and a certain substitute math teacher, while Isabelle’s belongs to a time many years ago and a certain visiting family friend, but they are linked by the common thread of desire twined with shame. See, both Amy and Isabelle have a secret, and the gradual exposure of that which is hidden forms the essence of the narrative. During the long hot summer that is the setting for Elizabeth Strout’s debut novel Amy and Isabelle, they are physically close - crammed together in the small quarters of the mill office - but psychologically alone estranged from each other and the people who surround them (people like jolly Fat Bev and hysterectomy survivor Dottie, Isabelle’s coworkers Avery Clark, Isabelle’s neurasthenic boss and Stacy, Amy’s apparently pregnant lunchtime smoking partner). Amy is a hormonally and emotionally confused 16-year-old trapped in a small mill town Isabelle is her mother, a repressed woman who has raised her daughter on her own.

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