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Published Sep 2020
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In this haunting parable of the American West, a young woman faces the violent past of her remote Montana valley.
As a child in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, Ruthie Fear sees an apparition: a strange, headless creature near a canyon creek. Its presence haunts her throughout her youth. Raised in a trailer by her stubborn, bowhunting father, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence, and her father's vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster, and the creature she saw long ago reappears as a portent of the valley's final reckoning.
An entirely new kind of western and the first novel from one of this generation's most wildly imaginative writers, Ruthie Fear captures the destruction and rebirth of the modern American West with warmth, urgency, and grandeur. The Technicolor bursts of action that test Ruthie's commitment to the valley and its people invite us to look closer at our nation's complicated legacy of manifest destiny, mass shootings, and environmental destruction. Anchored by its unforgettable heroine, Ruthie Fear presents the rural West as a place balanced on a knife-edge, at war with itself, but still unbearably beautiful and full of love.
"Loskutoff captures the vast and lonely land along with its beauty with breathtaking descriptions of violence and empathy, and ends with a shocking and poignant surprise. With its humor and heart, Loskutoff's harrowing tale offers a heroine to root for. This one hits hard." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With resonant characters and a great sense of place, this novel rarely goes where you'd expect, and is stronger for it." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Ruthie Fear was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Raised in small towns in the west, Maxim Loskutoff is the critically acclaimed author of Come West and See, an NPR and Amazon Best Book of 2018, a New York Times Editor's Pick, and winner of the High Plains Book Award. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and Playboy. His debut novel Ruthie Fear is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in September 2020. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana. Visit him at maximtloskutoff.com.
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