Rating: 
Summary: An outstanding first novel
Review: This is the best book I have read since Larry Lamb's She's Come Undone and I Know This Much to be True. I am sure it will soon be an Oprah pick. Ms. Strout captures the small mill town in Maine beautifully. I can smell the sulpher rising from the river that hot summer. Amy and Isabelle are so real. The mother's paranoia that everyone is thinking about them rings so true. I could not put this book down until I was finished and then was sad to be done. I can't wait for Ms. Strout's next book
Rating:
Summary: A remarkable achievement
Review: The descriptions of the weather, the seasons and various natural phenomena that we tend to take for granted reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but with a certain New England restraint. The inner lives of the characters are explored with empathy and no hint of false sentimentality. The town of Shirley Falls provides the main connection for the characters, and is in many ways more important than the plot itself. Above all, it is the wonderful characters the reader will remember.
Rating: 
Summary: "and it's funny too"
Review: Remember when you first read Oates, Steinbeck, Updike, Kingsolver? -- fill in the blank with a favorite. You fell in love and couldn't wait to read more. Can't wait to tell all my fellow 'bookies'...I've found one! Only it's her first and now I have to go searching for short stories until the next book's done. Complex mother-daughter relationship, awakening sexuality (and the opposite), vivid, small town chit-chat, a circle of rich minor characters and it's funny too.
Rating:
Summary: A perfect novel
Review: This novel gets an A- for ambition in scope and an A+ for fulfilling its ambitions and all of its promises. It is superbly crafted with phenomenal details, especially in its rendering of high school life, but its most notable success is its empathy for the main characters. I read it in one sitting, unable to stop. I doubt I will read a finer novel this year.
Rating: 
Summary: A wise, funny novel about family love and sexual secrets
Review: I'm not going to summarize the plot of "Amy and Isabelle" here. (Synopses=almost instant eye-glazing, in my experience.) I'm not going to tell a long publishing story, either--though I will say that working on this novel with Elizabeth Strout provides a happy conclusion to many years of admiring her short stories when I was an editor at The New Yorker. What I want to emphasize instead is that a book like "Amy and Isabelle" represents the most exciting and rewarding aspect of being an editor. To be allowed to look for and discover and then edit and publish literary work of this caliber and this level of accessibility--of this kind of wisdom and compassion--is a privilege and an honor, all right, but it's also great fun. This is especially so when the book involved has actually changed and enlarged the way one looks at the world, at what goodness and badness actually mean--as "Amy and Isabelle" has done for me. I hope that readers everywhere will share my admiration and enthusiasm for this extraordinary novel. Next to reading it, that kind of response from others would be the best reward of all. Did I say "conclusion" up at the top of this comment? Well, my other great hope is that the publication of "Amy and Isabelle" will also represent a beginning--the beginning of a an illustrious career of an important new American writer, Elizabeth Strout.
Rating:
Summary: A Writer of Promise
Review: This book is a first novel by a writer of extraordinary promise. Ms Strout possesses a great capability and talent for first-rate and intricate narrative description(s). Unfortunately, at times, the wish (of the reader) is that the writer would merely get on with the storytelling rather than indulging in elaborate foreshadowings and flashbacks and complex grammatical constructions. Often being an outstanding storyteller is preferable to writing merely passably good "literature". The reader sometimes gets the sense that the author is "trying too hard". Instances of elaborate grammatical constructions and archaic or colloquial tenses (e.g., "woken" for "awakened") sometimes detract from the generally excellent flow of the narrative. The story, however, is spellbinding, addresses the universality of the Human condition, and the craftsmanship with which it is woven portends great promise and high expectations of future work.
Rating:
Summary: Lecherous losers versus powerful sisters
Review: Isabelle lives with her daughter Amy in a New England mill town and keeps aloof from neighbors and co-workers. Amy is seduced by her math teacher. Amy and Isabelle fight and become reconciled. Isabelle gradually becomes less isolated. The mysteries of her past are revealed. It's a strong plot without being a melodramatic or high-concept one.
I found it hard to believe this was a first novel because it is so superbly crafted. It is told mainly from the point of view of Isabelle and Amy but shifts POV seamlessly whenever needed so as to give a vivid picture of the town of Shirley Falls. Sometimes an omniscient narrator steps in unobtrusively. The story opens during a hot humid summer. The main action is takes place over the preceding year, with each season artfully drawn; then it climaxes during a brisk autumn. It is further anchored in time by an evocative period setting in the early 60's, with men landing on the moon, typewriters, home economics classes, illegal abortions, and rumors of sexual liberation. When earlier back story is needed it is brought into perfectly natural dialog.
The characters are simple unsophisticated people but Strout neatly brings in literary parallels. Isabelle is mortified when Amy corrects her mispronunciation of Yeats. She tries to read the classics and is captivated by Madame Bovary. She thinks Emma should have stood by her man and tried to make something out of poor Charles.
Actually Charles Bovary is about the only male character who gets a good grade in this book. Most of the men are lecherous losers. Sisterhood is powerful in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Many thoughts
Review: Elizabeth Strout's novel "Amy and Isabelle" is beguilingly complicated, or complicatedly beguiling - I'm not sure which. Either way, it's gripping stuff. Taking place one summer in Maine, the story revolves around the relationship between fifteen-year-old Amy Goodrow and her repressed mother, Isabelle, who is hiding a secret. Given the course of the story, said secret will more than likely become manifest well before Strout actually states it outright. (Though more than likely you will want to read the whole thing through anyway.)
Without a doubt the book's greatest asset is the strength of the characters. Everybody, even the most peripheral of players, is three-dimensional. Although of course Isabelle and Amy are the primary focus of the tale, there are a few secondary characters who figure almost as prominently - most notably Mr. Robertson, the slimy math teacher with whom Amy becomes inappropriately involved; Stacy Burrows, Amy's troubled friend who becomes pregnant; and Avery Clark, Isabelle's boss, with whom she is secretly besotted. All of these characters and numerous others are multi-faceted and often riveting.
The book's greatest weakness is in its lack of humor. This may seem a rather preposterous comment given its decidedly unhumorous subject matter, but I mean it in a very subtle sense. Very often the tone of the story is intensely harrowing and maudlin, and one might well find oneself wondering if Strout could have found anyplace where it was possible to lighten things. She is obviously not without humor. (Take for example one scene early in the book, when Amy is angry at Mr. Robertson and writes something nasty but undisclosed about him on the wall of the school restroom. The ending sentence of this paragraph made me snicker out loud.) There are more than one of these instances, but they are too few and too brief - in my opinion, at any rate.
Overall, I found this a gripping story with a lot going for it, but not necessarily one I would put myself through more than once or twice. Perhaps this in itself is a testament to Strout's abilities as a writer - she really makes you go through everything the characters are going through right along with them.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, memorable mother/daughter drama...
Review: This novel is exceptional. Elizabeth Strout manages to take a simple, almost mundane story about a mother and her teenage daughter and turn it into something special. The story takes place in a year in the life of Isabelle, a single mother, and her daughter Amy. Amy falls in love with her math teacher, and mother and daughter are, at least for a while, torn apart due to said feelings. Amy is not the easiest person to deal with, but Isabelle's love and patience make an already wonderful, staggering story truly shine...The special thing about this novel is the incredible evocative powers Strout has. She is able to, with very few words, bring you to a time and a place, and you are there. That is not to say that the writing is in anyway "sparse". Quite the contrary, this is a rich novel, but without any excess weight. Amy and Isabelle, as characters are completely real, completely believable. Although I do give this novel five stars, it does have a few, minor flaws. Amy never wonders about her father, which I found a little hard to accept. Additionally, sometimes, Strout's involvement of the minor characters seemed a little forced. As a whole, however, this is an outstanding first novel and I look forward to her future works. This is a great book to discuss with other book enthusiasts. I've had this book for quite a while. I don't know why it took me this long to give it a whirl. Highly recommended...
Rating:
Summary: Merely O.K.
Review: Another take on the traditional mother-daughter struggle. I'm still waiting for a fresh approach!
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