Her infatuation with him has seismic repercussions on her relationship with her mother. It will not ruin any surprises to disclose that Amy falls in love with her math teacher, Mr. In the leisurely pace of a 19th-century novel, Strout describes what becomes of Amy and Isabelle when something does finally happen to them.

Who ''looked like mothers in television ads.'' Devoted to their quiet yearnings, Amy and Isabelle seem doomed to pine forever. Has almost no friends either, no consuming interests, and often nurses ''a vague and puzzling feeling of shame.'' Her terrible secret is that for years she has ''wanted a different mother,'' someone Though she could befriend other women in the office, Isabelle thinks they're beneath her. On a fence.'' Out of sheer loneliness, she has fallen in love with her stodgy boss at the mill. For Isabelle, ''life was moving forward the way that lives did, and yet she was no more grounded than a bird perched Nor part of WASP Oyster Point - they have shared a relationship of exclusive dependency and muted depression. Marooned on the edge of town since Amy's babyhood - neither part of the Basin, the working-class Roman Catholic community, That they also painfully love and need each other is what gives ''Amy and Isabelle'' its absorbing tension. In the same office - an intolerable situation for both since they have, just recently, begun to hate each other.

This ominous summer finds Amy and Isabelle working The fingers of a child.'' A few months earlier, a girl had been kidnapped from another town, and she is still missing a series of burglaries has also unnerved Shirley Falls. Set sometime in theġ960's, much of the action occurs during one stultifying summer, when the river looks like ''a dead brown snake,'' the air smells sulfurous and ''carrots stopped growing when they were no bigger than The novel's main characters are Amy, a shy 16-year-old, chiefly noticeable for her lovely blond hair, and her prim, anxiously single mother, Isabelle, a secretary at the local mill in the small New England town of Shirley Falls. One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place. Shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day.'' Capturing this daily complexity is exactly what Elizabeth Strout accomplishes in her evocative first novel, ''Amy and Isabelle,'' Within each family, as Cather notes, there are ''innumerable Life.'' Since they are the most necessary of bonds, family relationships are also the most imperfect, which is what makes writing about them so particularly challenging. N the best stories about families, one is invariably led to agree with Willa Cather's remark that ''human relationships are the tragic necessity of human A first novel charts the escalating tension between a woman and her teen-age daughter in a New England mill town.

Isabelle amy