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Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:Before there was Olive Kitteridge, there was Amy and Isabelleâ?¦ â??A novel of shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life.â?ťâ??Alice Munro Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Stroutâ??s bestselling and award winning debut, Amy and Isabelleâ??adapted for television by Oprah Winfreyâ?? evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant motherâ??and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Fallsâ??a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boysâ??only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past. A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitterid… (more)
I read this because I really like Elizabeth Strout's writing. But this first book was a bit different from her later writing. One reviewer compared it to Peyton Place in terms of the gossipy small town characters and that struck a chord with me. ( )
I seem to be awash in mother-daughter books and media -- first [Chouette], second we are watching *The Gilmore Girls* this winter (not bad), and now [Amy & Isabelle]. All are fraught in various ways, in two of the three the mothers are single, got pregnant 'by accident' at 16-17 and in the third the mother might as well have been. Here, isolation is central and, as the daughter reaches adolescence the strain increases, until, inevitably the connections breaks. Amy knows nothing about her parentage, her mother has kept the story a secret. When she gets involved with her math teacher (who is a sh** but . . . while Strout is not kind but she is fair to him) there is an inevitability to this as well; the implication being that the secret that Isabelle hides from Amy condemns them all to this scenario. The best parts of the book take place in the business office of the paper mill where Isabelle has worked for fifteen years and are made of the interactions, conversations, etc between the women who work there together. These lifted the book to another level for me. Amy's friendship with Stacy also rings true. A good solid story with some fine moments. ***1/2
quote: Isabelle towards the end, as the drama plays out: " the starkness" of what she had done "bothered her the most. What we do matters is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though, just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out." yep. Not rocket science, and yet, hard to hold onto.
That bit of advice and Don't keep secrets, they'll come back around and bite you in the butt are the lessons. Strout is nothing if not a New Englander! ( )
Isabelle Goodrow lives in a small cottage in Shirley Falls with her teenage daughter, Amy. Isabelle works as secretary to the head of the local mill. She longs for more, from him and from life itself. But her real concern is with and for her daughter. Yet her daughter is also filled with longing, and in the absence of better guidance bestows her affections on the substitute math teacher, Mr. Robertson. Both women are naive and vulnerable in their own way and their disappointments, when they arise, complicate their already entwined lives. Surviving this unbearably hot summer in Shirley Falls is hard to conceive. Surviving life itself is even harder.
Elizabeth Strout’s first foray into the lives of the denizens of Shirley Falls is a sprawling, sultry novel of awakenings. Young Amy is unprepared for the emotions and sexual yearning that she is about to encounter. But Strout suggests that none of the residents of Shirley Falls is prepared in any real sense for the events in their lives. Is unpreparedness the condition of all life? Perhaps. But more to the point is the differing ways in which each of responds to these contingencies. Both understanding and misunderstanding our closest and dearest. And yet somehow, for the most part, we muddle through.
about daughter & mother relationship. mother doesn't want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did. instead of understanding and empathizing, she tries to control her daughter. eventually, her daughter gets involved with her math professor, get caught and the mother finally confides that she did the same and thus was really and unwed mother.. instead of discussing with her daughter, she is more afraid of the shame brought on them. all ends well at the end ( )
Wonderful book. I think I’ve now read all of Strout’s books, kind of funny that I read her debut novel last. It was one of those books where I deliberately slowed down reading the last few chapters because I didn’t want it to end. ( )
Mutter-Tochter-Romane laufen schnell Gefahr, ins Triviale abzudriften, aber Strout gelingt es, diese Klippen zu umschiffen, indem sie sich nicht klaustrophobisch auf ihre Hauptfiguren konzentriert, sondern zugleich das Porträt einer Kleinstadt entwirft, deren Bewohner mit den vielfältigsten, ganz eigenen Stolpersteinen des Lebens umzugehen haben.
It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.
Quotations
Some thought the world might be coming to an end, and even those women not inclined to go that far had to admit it might not have been a good idea sending men into space, that we had no business, really, walking around up there on the moon.
But the heat was relentless and the fans rattling in the windows seemed to be doing nothing at all, and eventually the women ran out of steam, sitting at their big wooden desks with their legs slightly apart, lifting their hair from the back of their necks.
"I can't shut up for five minutes," she said, and Amy, keeping an eye on the clock one day, found this to be true.
Here was something new to fear—her daughter's pity for her ignorance.
What followed was something that Isabelle would speak of only once, years later, when her life had become a very different one. Amy, on the other hand, would later in her adulthood tell a number of people, until she realized finally that it was one story in a million and ultimately didn't matter to anyone.
So for Amy and Isabelle—their lives had changed completely. When they spoke to one another, their words seemed pushed through the air like blocks of wood.
Isabelle, lying on her bed in the summer darkness, a darkness that seemed porous and soft and something you could almost put your hand into, found it necessary, as she did on some of these nights, to go over it all once more in her head, as though this dreadful and wearying process of repetition was the only way she could absorb her—and her daughter's—present state.
The rain began during the night. It began softly, so softly that at first it did not seem to be falling from the sky as much as simply appearing in the darkened air.
It was like she had done a murder—it was like that.
Someone separate, Isabelle thought again, touching tentatively a lock of hair that fell across Amy's cheek.
Lives, flimsy as fabric, could be snipped capriciously with the shears of random moments of self-interest.
But what could you do? Only keep going. 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.
"We've destroyed your living room," Fat Bev said to Isabelle. "We might as well make pancakes and wreck your kitchen."
Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious.
All the love in the world couldn't prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.
'What we do matters' is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.
She would pray, "Oh please, God. Help us to be merciful to ourselves."
But why, thought Peg Dunlap, rushing down the street, should love be so hard?
Most of them did the best they could.
And not Isabelle Goodrow either, who, in spite of moments of coherence and hope, watched her daughter's anxious face in the evenings and knew that she had failed the girl in numerous ways; who, in driving to a small cemetery in Hennecock and hunting out a small girl's grave, knew that she was placing flowers there not only for the murdered child, but somehow for her own child, too, and for the mother of Debby Kay Dorne, who Isabelle imagined was living her own lifetime of private, ravaging regrets.
Always in her memory the leaves would be golden, the turnpike lined with golden-leaved trees, showered in the sunlight of morning, stiff with autumn.
Amy raised both eyebrows and drew her breath in sharply as she smiled, as though to say, "Okay, let's go," and for a moment they were united, as if they had both agreed to blast off in a rocket and it was countdown time. For years Isabelle would remember that moment and wish she had spoken, had told the girl she loved her and always would, because for Isabelle, as she pulled out onto the highway, it began to feel more and more that it was Amy who was blasting off, Amy who was leaving forever, that Isabelle was only there now to pilot the ship, deliver the girl into the lap of her family, of siblings, of relatives who were hers, not Isabelle's.
It marked for her the endless days of Amy's solitary childhood, and those endless hot days of that terrible summer. All that had once been endless would by then have ended, and Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself on the repeated word "Amy."
Last words
"Amy," she would think, "Amy," remembering this day's chilly golden air.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:Before there was Olive Kitteridge, there was Amy and Isabelleâ?¦ â??A novel of shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life.â?ťâ??Alice Munro Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Stroutâ??s bestselling and award winning debut, Amy and Isabelleâ??adapted for television by Oprah Winfreyâ?? evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant motherâ??and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. That they eat, sleep, and work side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Fallsâ??a location fans of Strout will recognize from her critically acclaimed novel, The Burgess Boysâ??only increases the tension. And just when it appears things can't get any worse, Amy's sexuality begins to unfold, causing a vast and icy rift between mother and daughter that will remain unbridgeable unless Isabelle examines her own secretive and shameful past. A Reader's Guide is included in the paperback edition of this powerful first novel by the author who brought Olive Kitterid
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