What readers think of Drowning Ruth, plus links to write your own review.

An apt title. While the writing is excellent I had higher hopes for the last third of the book. There was no satisfactory resolution. Amanda didn't learn anything. She doesn't take responsibility for her actions...everything is every one else's fault. She thinks she is in "control" but she is impulsive to such a degree that she ends up "killing" everyone around her. She had "lost her balance" years before...not just in the last few pages. I found her repugnant in the end. This book is not so much about "secrets" as not growing up and taking responsibility, thinking before you act, and realizing there are consequences. I'm disappointed that Ruth buys into Amanda's mental illness.

I found the plot hard to understand because throughout, the reader is given different levels of story of how the main event happened. But these layers of perspective are slightly different, and it was difficult to decipher which was ultimately true and the remaining layers proven false. This is hard to describe without specifics, but made the book unclear to me. Some may call it genius and mind-wracking, but I would say it poorly distiguishes between the lying and ultimately truthful statements strewn almost randomly throughout the novel.