All the stars!

Few writers can entrance so completely -- creating works of art that are on a completely different plane than most others in the category. Emily Ruskovich belongs in this class. Other reviewers have described the prose in this book as "music" or "poetry," and I agree.

"Idaho" is a book that requires slow, deliberate reading (which is fine since you'll want to savor the writing). The plot centers around a family, a horrific crime, a man losing his memory to early-onset Alzheimer's, and a wife trying to help her husband come to peace with the past. However, while the plot is substantive, the book's genius lies with character development and vivid descriptions of place and thought. This is a non-linear book which shouldn't be read for plot alone (if so, the reader might get frustrated -- and will miss the best parts).

Ruskovich has the ability to create for readers a vivid picture with just a few strokes. She introduces side characters and develops them wholly, in just a few pages, which doesn't detract from the main story but makes it that much richer. For me one of the most moving chapters in this whole novel involved a couple who was peripheral to the story as a whole. Channeling Hemmingway and his 6-word stories, Ruskovich crated a vivid portrait of their lives and their marriage in just a couple of pages. I had to set the book down, I was so stunned and moved. (This reminded me in some ways of [b:After the Parade|23492669|After the Parade|Lori Ostlund|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1437370195s/23492669.jpg|43082849], another book with phenomenal character development).

5 stars

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

I want you to read this book, it is so beautifully written. The key points are bleak as the writer braids together the lives of a rural family in Idaho, Idaho is another character in the book, over five decades and the story weaves back and forth between the dead and the living. There is a shocking murder and then incarceration. There is early-onset dementia and a missing child but all along are the different kinds of love threading through the years. Descriptions of the two preteen sisters stay with me, May reluctant to leave her older sister even to sleep: "June so close beside her, and the scared-dog smell of June invisible beneath the smell of the wet cushion and the cooling trees, that she could fall asleep here on her sister's shoulder...and not wake up until morning." p.294 And more: “sibling laughter–he can hear it– not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion.”

The vague guilt and nobility of the music teacher, Ann, as she tracks the changes in her husband's mind during the piano lessons. "One week he's playing both hands together. The next week, he struggles on a children's song, with only his right hand. Slowly, as the weeks go by and the weather turns cold, she turns the pages backward...to the place where they met, to the place where he didn't know the names of any notes." Someone called the book a poem in prose. It catches you and holds you at first stunned by the irreversible final act and then by the empathy of the characters, and of the author, as they struggle to survive loss. Ruskovich's song lyrics haunt me as though I could hear the melody: “Take your picture off the wall And carry it away. Dye your hair the shades of fall. Don't let time turn it to gray..."
A captivating tale and worth your time. ( )

I struggled with this book. If it hadn't been a book group choice, I would have given up at page 50, at page 100. I finally started to be rewarded for my persistence by page 200, when I started to 'get' some of the complex, three dimensional characters. I struggled with the narrative, hurrying back and forth between the decades. I struggled to believe in the characters, and I struggled with the time line of the story and the intermittent reappearance of some minor characters: what purpose does Eliot serve in the story? As I write, I'm talking myself out of this book again. Actually, it was a relief to finish it. ( )

I am having such a hard time verbalizing the way I feel about this book. All I really know is that I loved it to pieces and it is perhaps one of the most tender and beautifully written novels I have ever read. Before I write any further, I have to preface with this: if you are someone who is looking for an intense story with a gradual climax and a resolution, this book is not for you. Idaho is a completely character driven piece and will not exactly offer you any kind of closure.

The novel itself was a glimpse into a number of lives as opposed to a narrative of sorts; there was no real climax or story told, rather it was a look at the way a variety of people with different circumstances continued to live and reflect upon their lives in the wake of a horrific tragedy. I'm not one to cry at books, but the descriptions and actions of certain characters - Wade, in particular - tugged at my heartstrings and had me frequently teary-eyed. This book is about the many kinds of love that we are capable of along with the sacrifices that we are willing to make in order to affirm that warm, compassionate love. ( )

The author takes an unusual approach to a novel about a crime and its aftermath. Set in Idaho, jumping through various years from 1970s to 2020s, it is about a family’s tragedy. Near the beginning we find out that the mother, Jenny, has killed her six-year-old daughter, and another daughter is missing. The father, Wade, remarries Ann not long afterward. Ann is the focal point, trying to understand what happened. Her husband is now suffering from early-onset dementia so he cannot or will not tell her.

It is told in “patchwork” style, moving back and forth among characters and timelines to portray a segment of the story, which the reader will need to piece together. Several segments have little to do with the main storyline and I kept wondering why all these detours were needed. We visit Wade’s father, a schoolmate of one of the daughters, a prison inmate, and others only loosely related.

I liked the creative way the story was told, but after finishing, I felt a vague dissatisfaction. I kept wondering: Why did Ann get involved with this family? Why did Jenny kill her daughter? Why did Wade not look harder for his missing daughter and what happened to her? It is not a stretch to then wonder: Why did I read this book?

If you like a linear story or one where answers to a mystery are provided, this is not your book. I do not need all things tied up in a bow and am generally comfortable with open endings, but this one goes to extremes. I am left with an ambivalent feeling – 3 stars.
( )

This book does not live up to the descriptions I read on Amazon or even on the back of the book. The execution is what was lacking. I read this as a book club selection, and we all agreed that it was hard to follow. The constant jumping around in time frames was confusing. I've read other books that do this and haven't had a problem, but this one just eluded me. The description of the Wade's illness and its progress did not bother me at all; I actually liked the truthful descriptions and the heart-rending experiences because I found them to be very realistic. I did not understand the purpose of some of the characters and found that the addition of them only added to the confusion. I had to keep flipping back to earlier pages to find out who a few people were. One of our group listened to the audiobook and found it particularly hard to follow since flipping back wasn't an option. I appreciate the story line and the attempt at a deeper meaning, but I found several things so distracting that it took away from the story. ( )

I did not care for this book. It was hard to follow all of the characters and keep them all straight. It just was not an easy book to read. ( )

Emily Ruskovich writes a beautiful sentence. Unfortunately, all her lovely language never quite makes up for flat characters endlessly circling around one lurid and unlikely moment. ( )

I'm very glad the Morning News Tournament of Books included this on their shortlist in order for me to read it sooner. I possibly wouldn't have been aware of it at all. Sadly, 'Idaho' was also matched up in the first round against another of my favorite books about Alzheimer's and caregiving:'Goodbye, Vitamin' by Rachel Khong. I'm glad I wasn't the judge for that! A book with shifting perspectives, some for only a few pages, but each perspective spot on. Usually very sad but the imagery is lovely. Each word seems perfectly placed, polished, refined. Each chapter is like a jewel in a necklace, but in the end, some of these jewels aren't quite fitting with the others. There were a couple mysteries I was reading towards seeing solved. Answers aren't exactly there. But that's life. Sometimes there aren't answers. BUT this also isn't life, this is a story. However, Emily Ruskovich is amazing at images and these images will stay with me and I will go wherever Ruskovich wants me to go. I hope another book is on the way! ( )

This book starts well and grabs your attention, not with a whodunit but a howdunit and whodunit. However after the first half it wavers and goes off in tangents that I'm not sure are germane to the book. It could have been shorter and therefore may have been better. ( )

This novel of sadness and isolation still holds great appeal. Told from the perspectives of Jenny, a mother who for seemingly no reason kills her younger daughter, and Ann, piano teacher and second wife to Wade, the father of that girl, the solitary lives on an Idaho mountain and in prison run in parallel. Switching time frames from the murder in 1975 through Jenny’s release from prison in 2025, there are many mysteries here, but not about the inherent goodness of Wade, who is facing his own mortality in the form of early onset dementia. Tragedy abounds. Jenny's motive for taking May’s life remains cloudy, and the disappearance of June, the elder sister who ran away into the woods in the aftermath of her sister May’s death, is a constant festering wound for Ann and Wade. Side characters, like the sketch artist who draws aging portraits of June; Eliot, the object of Jenny’s crush, who loses a leg in an accident; Elizabeth, Jenny’s cellmate, and their devotion to each other; and even Wade’s dogs, all add to the melancholy. ( )

This novel opens by introducing compelling issues about the nature of love and the compromises we make to be in relationship with one another, but it never really delivers. The characters are unrealistically self-reflective and there are several that don't need to be in the story at all. Overall there are just too many words saying too little. With more focus it could be awesome, but it doesn't read like a finished story. ( )

The title says, "Idaho - A Novel". I think the last bit is an assertion of intent meant to guide people like me who reach the end of the book knowing that I'd read something wonderful but not really being able to label it.

Each chapter in "Idaho" is a work of art. Emily Ruskovich can write in a way that makes you fully aware of how a particular person is experiencing something that is vivid and immediate but also ladened with context and possibility.

At one point she even helped me see inside the head of a blood hound on a search, head down, ears and folds of skin dampening all other stimuli except the hundreds of scents that contain the one scent I am looking for.

It seemed to me, that for much of the novel, I had become that blood hound and that each chapter was a scrap of fabric, soaked in sorrow, confusion, regret, guilt, love and, occasionally hope, that I would bend over and sniff at until I had extract every scent of emotion and traced the trails of circumstance, intent, memory and consequence that connect the chapters and the people in them.

It is an intense, absorbing experience that speaks to senses, my emotions but, by itself, does not satisfy my need for a narrative leading to some form of release. The non-linear nature of this narrative, the emphasis on moments of being and intense but bounded insights into a person, meant that reading "Idaho" felt more like experiencing other people's lives than it did reading a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end. I was given lots of hard, emotionally taxing questions but I was offered only the inference of answers, much as I am in real life.

There is a narrative. It is triggered by an act of violence that changes the lives of almost all of the characters in the book. Revealing this narrative in a non-linear way is not done to enhance the tension or to build to a great reveal, but to show that we are not the events that we live through. They can harm us or help us but the self we bring to each moment is what shapes the outcome of an event.

I'm sorry if that sounds obscure. Emily Ruskovich would never say anything so clumsily as that. It is merely me, trying to find meaning in what I was reading.

In "Idaho" I spent time seeing the world through the eyes of many people: May, a six year old girl living an isolated rural life in which her most intense relationship is with June, her older sister, whom she simultaneously loves and resents; Elizabeth, spending her life in prison for murder and trying to allow herself friendship and perhaps even love; Jenny, a woman who is trying to abnegate her right to anything she desires but who cannot stop herself from offering something of herself to others; Wade, a man who has survived tragedy and guilt and love but who is losing himself with each memory that slips out of reach; and Anne, who falls lives a life of sorrow-filled love that she does not feel entitled to cut herself free from.

I will remember these people for a long time. I will remember their joys and their pain and their ability to survive as long as they are remembered by someone, even if it is only themselves. I will remember the mountain they lived on and how its wildness and isolation and unforgiving winters shaped them like wind eroding sandstone.

Yet I still struggle with "Idaho" as "a novel". Probably this says more about my expectations than about Emily Ruskovich's writing but it changed my experience of the book. If "Idaho" had been a collection of short stories, I'd have gone, "How wonderful. This is like reading Alice Munro" but it was labelled a novel so I found myself expecting more connection.

The best example of what I mean is a character in this book, a young man who loses his leg through an accident in high school, who's experiences and thoughts are beautifully described but who seems to have only the most tangential connection to the other people in the book. I invested my imagination in him. I didn't like him but I began to understand him. Yet I couldn't make him fit and my inability to do so distracted and annoyed me.

I strongly recommend this book, novel or not. The writing is simply wonderful. The experiences are harrowing but in a way that made me more empathetic than horrified.

I am astonished that this is Emily Ruskovich's debut novel. I look forward to reading everything else that she writes.

I listened to the audio book version of "Idaho" which is read with consummate skill by Justine Eyre. She helped my hound dog follow the scent trails in the this book much more easily and with more passion than I had only read the text. ( )

This book spoke to me in so many surprising ways. I wasn't even prepared to like this book. I thought it would be a sad book with a mystery to solve. It was neither of these things. This was a character study, the first I have ever loved. This story is told by each of the characters in the book, in little and big ways. It makes you feel what it would be like for each person involved in this tragic incident. I'm so glad I read this. ( )

Excellent writing, very depressing. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2019/11/2019121-idaho-emily-ruskovich.html ( )

Unbelievably dull. I have no problem with slow moving, character driven books but I honestly struggled through this.. Ended up skim reading the last third, and even that was an effort. ( )

A beautiful and very literary rumination on the nature of love, the peace that comes from forgiveness, the pain of inexplicable and irredeemable choices (the backpack left on the ice [by June?] and Jenny's moment of violence), the limits and agonies of memory, and the need for human connection. Ruskovich has a distinct, quiet and authoritative voice . Quiet might be the most important quality. There is so much glorious space in this prose. It made me think of Wallace Stegner and Louise Erdrich. Ruskovich writes with the confidence and restraint of a far older person, but never seems precocious -- just still and observant.

One note, this is not a thriller, the structure is non-linear, and there is a grand total of zero answers to any of the many questions the story raises. If you showed up looking for Gillian Flynn or Lianne Moriarty, you came to the wrong book. ( )

SPOILER ALERT: Much is revealed here, so if you ‘re going to read this fine book, read what I have to say after you have finished that last page.

There is a shocking brutality at the heart of this novel. A six-year-old girl named May, ends up murdered, her sister, June, is forever lost in the woods, and a woman goes to prison--their mother. Idaho is the title and the rugged setting for this story of the girls and their parents (Wade and Jenny), and Wade’s second wife, Ann. Wade and Ann love each other deeply, but all the details of what happened with the girls hasn’t been revealed. Wade has such a deep pain and anger within him, that it warps his character, and keeps him from ever revealing much to his new wife. His haunting and angry resistance to discussing this painful past has stymied Ann from learning much, and now his early onset dementia is hiding the facts of his own life from Wade himself. He’s very unpredictable. Once, Ann returns home to find that Wade has cut a large number of square holes all the way through the outside walls of their home, so that the stray cat in the house can get out. Okay?
This book is a brilliant look into the minds surrounding a brutal act, what may have caused it, and how it changed the people involved, and even those just looking for the truth. Ann’s attempts to learn from the sometimes-violent Wade, are a combination of gently and slowly, up against the ticking of the clock of his advancing dementia. The answers held in his head are losing definition and fading into a haze. Memory is anything but definitive in the best of times, but stacking shock, brutality, and illness on top of already unimaginable events, makes every single person’s memory very singular, personal, and different. Readers also learn some facts from Elizabeth, Jenny’s prison cellmate, things revealed from their many conversations.
Ruskovich is so good at describing the smallest detail with such care, that one could easily get lost when she continually has her characters paying notice to the looks and the smells of objects and places, like the inside of a truck or a glove. I love her descriptions of all the scents trapped in a simple glove that they had rubbed on the snout of the tracking bloodhound when it was leading the initial search for June. The author even shifts to the viewpoint of the hound as it tries to make sense of all the glove’s smells: grease, blood, sweat, the girl’s hair, honeysuckle, a skinned deer, seeds, and the smell of the truck. Not surprising, the dog has no luck in finding the girl. Yet, readers are also given the hound’s eye view as it travels along with its snout close to the ground, its huge ears hanging down and creating a tunnel that funneled all scents to its nose. I will now always think of intelligent design whenever I look at a bloodhound’s massive ears.
The book also requires that the reader stay alert to what’s going on and which particular character is informing the story. The chapters are titled with a single year, or a group of years, but are never marching in any chronological order through the book. You are dropped into many different times, acts, and with any of the books cast of characters.
The writing is vivid and so very rich with luscious details and language. Allow me to quote just one phrase, when Ann and Wade were watching dozens of blackbirds in the sky as they “converge and scatter like a handful of black sand thrown against the sky.” There seemed to be countless strokes of brilliance throughout the book. The book is a brutal joy to read.
The book won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, as well as the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award, with an impressive award of $111,000. Reviews have made comparisons of Ruskovich to other writers such as Jim Harrison, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Kesey, and Rick Bass. I find myself easily agreeing with this, and it also explains my appreciation for her writing.
The fact that Ruskovich could pull this all off in her first published novel is amazing, and it definitely puts her on my radar screen for whatever she publishes next.

from a review
“Wrenching and beautiful … You’re in masterly hands here. [Emily] Ruskovich’s language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that decency can save us.” – The New York Times Book Review ( )

atmospheric, but confusing. Follows several stories at once.
Tale of a man with dementia, his ex-wife who murdered their daughter, a fellow female prisoner and his current wife ( )

Idaho is a beautifully written debut, telling a (sometimes frustratingly) non-linear story about a violent act and the events that unfolded afterwards.

If you’re looking for a mystery or a story where you get all the answers tied up in a neat little bow, this is not the book for you. Why would anyone ever harm a child? In the author’s words, “motive, if there is one, ceases to matter the moment she commits this shocking act, because compared to the act itself, the explanation will always be so inadequate as to feel nonexistent.”

I get the complaints from other readers, looking for an answer or concocting some wild theories as to what actually happened in order to make up for the absence of an explanation, but I prefer stories that seem more honest and real. The lack of clarity and the fact that June’s perspective is conspicuously missing certainly achieve that. ( )

The novel begins with Ann and Wade. They are married, and Ann is obsessed with Wade’s tragic past. His first wife, Jenny, murdered one of their daughters; the other daughter ran from the scene and was never found. Wade now has dementia and does not remember any of it clearly.

Each chapter begins with a point in time, usually a year, and the story is not told chronologically. Also, the main perspective changes with the chapters. Sometimes told from Ann’s point of view, sometimes Jenny’s, sometimes Jenny’s cellmate in prison, sometimes Ann’s imaginary view of the daughters, and rarely from Wade’s perspective.

The writing is beautiful and the author is able to adeptly set the scene and the emotion. I appreciated reading about a setting I am familiar with in northern Idaho. The characters are not particularly lovable. The only character I really liked was the younger daughter, and that was not even really her but Ann’s imagined version of her.

This book frustrated me because each perspective was a woman living vicariously through other women. It felt like they were always escaping themselves and placing themselves at the whim of some other actor rather than having much of their own agency. When they did have agency, they were related to negative acts like violence and theft. I felt cheated that I didn’t get to know more about why Jenny killed her child.

I need more time to think about what I feel about this book.
In terms of writing and plot flow, I had no comments and enjoyed the writing and the sequence even though the plot continued for several years and jumped back and forth. My interest is with the plot itself, that is, its probability. I think there is nothing worse than the first time we discover something is wrong with us or someone close to us. First is the doubt - why I acted against all human logic, then those fears and finally the acceptance or lack of awareness.

I think this story and its characters will stay with me for a long time. ( )

A very thought provoking novel about a married woman with two girls. She murders her youngest daughter and the second goes missing. She ends up in prison with a lengthy prison stay. Her ex husband (Wade, who has early onset dementia) remarries an accepting new wife (Ann). The novel follows their married life as well as his ex wife's stay in prison. Really interesting how it all pans out. It was justly deserving of the Edgar Award for best first mystery novel. Ms, Ruskovich is a rising star and I can't wait for her second book. ( )

a much quieter novel than the blurb implies, with some of the loveliest prose i've seen all year ( )