Strout’s Amy and Isabelle was well received, and even made the New York Times bestseller list when it came out, but what The Times and others missed by focusing on Isabelle and Amy’s mother-daughter relationship is Strout’s brave and brilliant rendering of Amy’s transition from girlhood into early adulthood.

The narrative voice of the book itself echoes Amy’s adolescence through its raw descriptive prose and pervasive sense of nostalgia. The plot moves forward not through a traditional series of interrelated events leading to inevitable outcomes, but through a series of mysteries, through which Amy is exposed to the secrets and lies of the adult world.

The awkward and often uncomfortable physical transition of Amy's teenage body into that of a mature woman is reflected in the raw descriptions of Shirley Falls and its inhabitants:

“The river seemed dead … dirty yellow foam collecting at its edges … the gagging, sulfurous smell … pole beans were small and shriveled on the vine … carrots … no bigger than the fingers of a child … A handful of women … sitting at their big wooden desks with their legs slightly apart, lifting the hair from the backs of their necks.”

Amy begins the novel feeling ill at ease with her own appearance, avoiding mirrors and the confused emotions they produce in her. By the end of the novel, she comes to accept and even revel in her newfound form. “A thrill straight down her middle,” at her sudden awareness that she is attractive to men: “It was here … that desire rose in her again, desire, and the power of her own desirability … Beneath her turtleneck Amy was conscious of her breasts tucked into their Sears bra, breasts that had been offered and would be offered again to men whose eyes became unfocused with longing.”

In addition to its sympathetically (sympathetic to Amy that is) self-conscious physical rendering, the town suffers, along with her, from some vague adolescent longing, a nostalgia, the idea that life had once promised something beautiful and sexy that it has never delivered. This nostalgia is embodied in the description of a small forgotten park at the river’s edge:

"The sun could set so stridently in wintertime, slicing pinkish golds along the horizon, with the bare elms at the edge of the bank seeming austere and dark, emboldened. But hardly anyone went into the park for long. The park itself was nothing much to look at, having nothing more than a broken swing set and a few scattered benches, many of them missing a slat from their seats."

Also afraid of giving up on life's inherent promise of drama, adventure, love...Amy’s mother, Isabelle, refuses to commit to purchasing the small house she has been renting for years because, “She could not bear to stop thinking her real life would happen somewhere else.”

Like adolescence, the story is not driven by a dynamic plot. Nothing in Shirley Falls feels inevitable. Life progresses through inertia, not change. Instead, the novel is propelled forward by a series of mysteries continually being presented and uncovered. From the first chapter, we find out that Amy’s long, golden hair has been inexplicably and unflatteringly cut. We find out that Mr. Robertson has left town, and also that Isabelle is keeping hidden something about the death of her husband. And when Paul Bellows drives Amy into the woods and drags her out of the car because he has to show her something, we don’t know any more than she does what his real intentions are. Strout reveals the mysteries of Shirley Falls to us, not all at once, but like a landscape through a thinning fog. And by the time each secret is revealed, she's somehow made us feel that it's something we already knew.

Reading this book awakens all sorts of emotions relating to the American adolescent experience: strange sexual curiosity mixed with an ominous foreboding about what that curiosity may bring; nostalgia for some life we feel we’ve been promised but have never had; and a sense that the adult world is simultaneously trying to keep from us all that is wonderful and all that is terrible. How Strout accomplishes this is part of the unique voice that carries us through Amy’s adolescence and through this fascinating novel.

Kate Chenard is a writer with an MFA at George Mason University. She is curently shopping her first novel to agents. Her articles, personal essays, and fiction have appeared in "Phoebe," a literary journal, "The Hill Rag," and "The Hill Community Marketplace," both Washington DC community newspapers. She currently teaches AP English at a private school in Virginia. She can be reached at katechenard@msn.com.