Audrey He, 17, Plano West Senior High School, Plano, Texas
Amid the oppressive heat of summer in a small New England mill town, a young mother and her teenage daughter have fractured. So begins the quietly enthralling saga that is “Amy and Isabelle,” Elizabeth Strout’s debut novel chronicling the forces of love, shame and youth.
Amy Goodrow is 15 when she meets Mr. Robertson, her new math teacher. To Amy, he is wonderfully novel (“‘Was it really Cheerios you wanted for breakfast this morning?’ he asks the class, ‘Or did you eat those Cheerios simply from habit? Because your mother told you to’”), charming and attentive. As the months pass Amy falls in love; slowly, Mr. Robertson reciprocates, crossing the line from affection to seduction.
All of this is unbeknown to Isabelle Goodrow, who works a mundane job as a secretary by day, returning to the home she shares with the daughter she grows more distant from every night (“‘It’s Yeats, Mom. Not Yeets,’” Amy tells her mother, who reels in humiliation: “Here was something new to fear — her daughter’s pity for her ignorance”). When Isabelle discovers Amy’s secret affair, the taut strings of their relationship snap.
“Amy and Isabelle” is not a typical narrative of sexual predation. Amy is her own person, a teenage girl desperate for self-possession (as most teenage girls are), and her relationship to Mr. Robertson is imbued with the thrilling passion of first love: she thinks of his “intimate, wonderful voice” as she does homework; she prepares herself to see him after school as if going on a date, pinching her cheeks in the mirror. It is twisted, taboo, wrong. But Strout writes with a potent compassion that makes it difficult not to empathize.
Yet the book is not really about Amy and Mr. Robertson. It is about the secrets kept between parent and child, the startling intimacy that lies beneath the ordinary, how we cling to wreckage in the wake of devastation.
The titular characters are often cruel (Amy grows annoyed simply at the way “her mother’s face was tilted on the end of her long neck, like some kind of garter snake”). But they are also loving, fierce and brilliant. One night, when Isabelle comes home and does not find Amy (who is still with Mr. Robertson), she fears Amy has been kidnapped: “She felt as though cold water were pouring through her arms, her legs. She went down the stairs, stumbling at the bottom, bracing herself against the wall. This isn’t happening, she thought. This isn’t happening.”
This, Strout reminds us, is what it is to be human.
“Amy and Isabelle” is a triumph, exploring the crevices of the heart, the faults of our interior terrains, with incredible tenderness and nuance.