Amy and Isabelle: A novel

Written by:
Elizabeth Strout
Narrated by:
Stephanie Roberts

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
15
Narrator
2
Release Date
November 2013
Duration
11 hours 28 minutes
Summary
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.
Reviews
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Dorothy A

I did enjoy the book until the end. I felt like the author did not know how to end it. It just stopped.

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