Book Marks reviews of Ruth by Kate Riley Book Marks
Publisher
Riverhead Books
The arc of a woman’s life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning. Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness?
What The Reviewers Say
It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth … Many delights … Ruth doesn’t speak to us directly, but Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible … Delightful buoyancy … The novel offers us life as seen through slits in a picket fence: We catch bright, sometimes hilarious moments, but the continuity of Ruth’s experience is splintered … Many graces.
Much of the book’s quirky humor comes from Riley’s deadpan tone and her juxtaposition of odd details … Grapples with free will and with valuing the collective over the individual … What a strange and wonderful book this is — emphasis on the strange. No, wait — emphasis on the wonderful.
There are inklings of greatness … It isn’t easy of access and won’t be to everyone’s taste … Defiantly strange … I respect this novel enough to say this in criticism: The reader waits for a second act, for a deepening or a new chord to appear, and it never quite does. Ruth begins to flatten about two-thirds of the way through. You end this novel swimming in the same water you entered … Is in touch with the oldest and darkest things in our makeup, yet revels in a very modern sense of what Riley calls ‘brainy female despair.’
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