Amy & Isabelle, by Elizabeth Strout

Small town America is beautifully evoked in Strout’s tale of a fraught mother-daughter relationship. Desperate for love, Amy is almost 16, shy and sullen with a burgeoning sexuality, on the cusp of beauty. Repressed and uptight Isabelle is a natural outsider who both loves and resents her daughter, reacting with fear to her painful transition to adulthood. The timeframe moves back and forth over several months of a sweltering summer, for no apparent purpose but to create artificial tension. The result is some confusion about exactly what is happening when. The period is also a little vague; some references place it around the 1970s, but it could be later Sympathy switches between mother and daughter as the story progresses; there are no black and white heroes and villains here. Even the repulsive grooming maths teacher elicits some understanding. The environment and climate are almost extra characters, with lives of their own that contribute to the narrative. In some ways what Amy and Isabelle go through is common to most adolescent rites of passage, but their own particular demons of past and present, secrets and lies, inform the love and loathing of their relationship. Elements of the town of Shirley Falls are hyper-real, which serves to highlight the very real relationships within it.