Amy and Isabelle

Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student, 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 for 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 Bey, the community's enormous (and enormously funny and compassionate) peacemaker and amateur medical consultant. Elizabeth Strout makes us hope that these extraordinary ordinary people will find a way out of their often self-imposed emotional exile.