I've bugged many of you on here for titles, especially if you were from a smaller state or an area that has had a smaller output of literature. I knew I wanted to start in Maine, I knew I wanted my reading road trip to follow a geographic trail that would make cogent sense in a vehicle, and I knew I wanted to include fiction, middle grades reads, and poetry. Since this past June, I've been somewhat obsessed with compiling my itinerary. So, why not travel the way I've always traveled best? Through books. It has been far too long since I've had a good road trip, and I am determined to see all 50 states of this still-beautiful nation before I die.īut, despite my itch, my reality has informed me that I'm not going anywhere.
Last summer, as I realized yet again that a road trip across America would not take place (due in part to First Daughter's chronic car sickness and the same daughter's inability to spend 5 minutes in a contained space with Second Daughter), I went into a funk. 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. 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.
Keeping Isabelle and Amy as the main focus of her sharp, sympathetic eye, Elizabeth Strout attends to them all. 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. 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. In a fury, she lashes out at her daughter's beauty and then retreats into outraged silence. When discovered, this emotional and physical trespass brings disgrace to Amy's mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame she feels about her own past. 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.
With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the love between a mother and her daughter.
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