Amy and Isabelle

  

Someone has been clever with the design of these Elizabeth Strout novels.  Plain cream covers with red and black text and a red spine.  Very simple and effective.  While Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton are very accomplished novels my favourite is still Amy and Isabelle.

Teenage Amy has abundant hair and a sensitive nature which attract the attention of her charismatic maths teacher who quotes the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay while beginning a slow seduction of Amy which takes place over the course of a long New England winter and spring. 

Isabelle, unaware that her daughter is being dazzled by her maths teacher, has her own troubles.  Raising Amy alone and forced to take a job at the Mill which she feels is beneath her she yearns to fit in with the middle-class wives of Oyster Point and is unable to see the solid worth of Fat Bev and the other women who work at the Mill.   

Set in Shirley Falls, Maine, the river which divides the town marks both geographic and social divisions.  The yearnings and tensions of the inhabitants of Shirley Falls come to a head under a burning white sky during the hottest summer the town has ever known.

This novel has likeable central characters in Amy, Isabelle and Fat Bev who will have you routing for them.  (I never could route for Olive Kitteridge)  There is a side story involving Amy's vulnerable best friend Stacy (who can't construct a sentence without the f word) and a recurring motif of a missing girl.  Elizabeth Strout is always good on landscape and the river and weather brilliantly reflect the events of the novel.  A great late summer read.