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The Girl Who Chased The Moon
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Interviews
Ingrid Law
Ingrid Law talks about the inspiration for Savvy
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S.J. Parris writes about her inspiration for Heresy, which masterfully blends true events with fiction into a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
John Hart
In a letter to his readers, John Hart talks about becoming a writer and the challenges he faced in writing The Last Child.
Adam Haslett
A conversation with Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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   Summary and Book Reviews

Amy and Isabelle: Summary and book reviews of Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, plus links to an excerpt from Amy and Isabelle and a biography of Elizabeth Strout.

Amy and Isabelle Amy and Isabelle
by Elizabeth Strout
Hardcover: Jan 1999,
304 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2000,
304 pages.

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Critics' Opinion:   good
Readers' Rating:  Five Stars
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Book Summary

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.

Book Reviews


Good  Publishers Weekly
Strout lays out her teacher's charms as clearly as his caddishness, and her portrait of a young woman stumbling on the shattering power of lust--her own and others'--balances delicacy with frankness and breathtaking acuity. In the end, it is Isabelle who stays with the reader; devastated by her daughter's betrayal, riven with regrets over a life left largely unlived, she must somehow make amends to herself.

Good  Kirkus Reviews
A lyrical, closely observant first novel, charting the complex, resilient relationship of a mother and daughter...In less sure hands, all of this would seem merely melodramatic.

Author Blurb  Alice Munro
A novel of shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life.

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