
Amy and Isabelle
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Stephanie Roberts
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By:
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Elizabeth Strout
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.
©2013 Elizabeth Strout (P)2013 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Where does Amy and Isabelle rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
#1What was one of the most memorable moments of Amy and Isabelle?
that would be a spoilerHave you listened to any of Stephanie Roberts’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
excellent readerIf you could take any character from Amy and Isabelle out to dinner, who would it be and why?
Isabelle, I'd like to sit down and talk to her. Or maybe Fat Bev. I liked all the women characters in this book.Any additional comments?
Elizabeth Strout's characters are so real. Complicated people who do dumb stuff, make mistakes. But they are also capable of love, and those wonderful moments of real human love and insight. I find it easy to identify with all of them.beautiful characters
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Amazing.
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Amy and Isabelle
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Absorbing, beautiful
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I'm picky about narrators, and this one is pretty good. Occasionally a bit actor-ish, but generally authentic and without the overlay of her own opinions that spoils so many otherwise good audiobooks.
Another reviewer called it offensive. Well, a couple of scenes are quite explicit, but that was really necessary to evoke an adolescent girl's ignorance in the context of her first sexual encounter. Really poignant, the way she mistakes rutting passion for romance, and without that nuance the rest of the story wouldn't play.
Honest, tough and absorbing
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Real life
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This book grows on you and stays!
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Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would not recommend this book to a friend. The mother/daughter relationship storyline appealed to me. However, the author described every little thing in unnecessary detail. For example, if a leaf is green I find it unnecessary to spend five minutes talking about the shade of green. If a character does something gross, a five minute description of just how gross is a turn-off in my opinion. In summary, the book could have held my interest if it the author had not gone on and on and on about things that had no bearing on the storyline. Since that was not the case, I got through only about 3/4 of the audio.Would you be willing to try another book from Elizabeth Strout? Why or why not?
No, because she goes on and on and on about things that are insignificant to the story.What about Stephanie Roberts’s performance did you like?
The narrator had a nice, professional, theatrically-trained sounding voice. She did not take deep loud breaths after each sentence like so many audible narrators do. I also appreciate that I did not hear smacking and saliva as I do with many of the narrators. I would love to hear her read a more interesting book.Could you see Amy and Isabelle being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
I could see it being made into a movie,but it would be a very dark, solemn, depressing movie. It definitely would not be a movie I would want to see.Good story line but too much detail
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Such a honestly written book
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This book in particular was interesting from the beginning. Was immediately taken (negatively at first) by both mother & daughter yet was constantly propelled forward to share their lives and their own self discovery.
All Strouts characters, minor or central, are well rounded and clear. Each character brings their own story and relevance to the plot. I particularly love the fact that her main characters, women are all mostly independent, individualistic and deep.
Excellent
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