Amy and Isabelle (Strout) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Evocative...one of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place.
Suzanne Berne - New York Times Book Review


Unflaggingly engaging...What a pleasure to gain entry into the world of this book.
New Yorker


Amy and Isabelle is an impressive debut....with an expansiveness and inventiveness that is the mark of a true storyteller.
Philadelphia Inquirer


This first-time novelist is destined for great things....Stunning.
San Francisco Chronicle


[A]n impresive debut novel....Strout writes with abundant warmth.
Laura Jamison - People Magazine


[I]n Strout's sure hands, [the central revelatory] truth isn't awful but, in fact, revelatory.
Vanessa V. Friedman - Entertainment Weekly


Strout's insights into the complex psychology between [mother and daughter] result in a poignant tale about two comings of age.
Time


Lovely, powerful.
Jeff Giles - Newsweek


Stories of young women who suffer the sexual advances of an authority figure (in this case, a high school math teacher) seem ubiquitous these days. But in Strout's gently powerful, richly satisfying debut, the damage shows less within the heart of the teenaged girl in question than in the wreckage of the previously tranquil relationship she had enjoyed with her mother.
Publishers Weekly


This mother-daughter novel tells the story of how Isabelle Goodrow escaped her past and moved to a small town with her daughter, telling everyone her husband and family were dead..... [Strout's] attention to the detail of everyday life resembles that of Alice Munro and Anne Tyler. —Nancy Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Library Journal


A lyrical, closely observant first novel, charting the complex, resilient relationship of a mother and daughter..... Matters come to a head when Amy [the daughter] and her teacher are discovered in compromising circumstances.... In less sure hands, all of this would seem merely melodramatic.
Kirkus Reviews