Ruthie Fear is a beautifully written book and I highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a unique and gritty story about the present day American West told with raw emotion.
We learn about Ruthie’s life from her hard scrabble, motherless childhood being raised by a coarse, but caring father. The descriptions of the land and the characters are wonderful.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3354257979

Advance reader copy. I appreciate the opportunity to review this book in advance of publication.

For three quarters of this book (except for one quibble I will mention below), I was enthralled by this novel, deeply moved by the characters who people it, in admiration of the author's ability to portray the reality of the lives in which they find themselves, and in awe of the quality of the writing.

Ruthie Fear is a girl who becomes a woman in the course of the novel, raised by her father in a teal trailer in the middle-of-nowhere Montana that is slowly transforming into a bedroom community for larger cities, as such cities are encroaching on the wild places around them all over the country. Their community is a poor one, and the wealthy who come to settle there (if only into their vacation homes for a few months a year) are deeply resented and despised. For the most part, Ruthie is no exception to the general run of those who have lived here their whole lives: stubborn, restless, angry, sad, struggling people who both love the land they live in and feel trapped by that love. At one point Ruthie tries to get away, but she has no tools for living anywhere but this little backwater town.

Violence and guns are a way of life to Ruthie, who grows up knowing how to shoot, with a father who loves to own guns and give them to his daughter as gifts, so that when she reaches adulthood she has no fewer than seven guns to her name. There are other forms of violence, too, of a more pedestrian kind; fistfights and threats, emotional manipulation and near-rape. For all this, Ruthie lives a fairly normal life, graduating high school, working in the local diner, trying to make a life for herself. Men enter and leave her life, and their presence or absence is the driving force behind much of what transpires in the book.

So far, so good. All of this is movingly told, with a poetic sense for the use of language and a fine ear for dialogue. (The one exception is the use of sentence fragments; though I understand the power of this technique, pulling the reader up short, forcing us to pay attention, Loskutoff resorts to fragments far too often for this to be effective. They begin to feel merely sloppy, displaying a lack of care, the casual use of a period where a comma or semicolon would have sufficed and not interrupted the flow).

But in the final quarter of the book, the allegory which has been lurking takes over the story, becoming the entirety of it. One could speculate on what is meant by what transpires, and I suppose to the author it had some great message to convey, but to me it seems mostly a way to shock our sensibilities, scold us for expecting a conventional ending to a lovely, sad story. I am sure our destructiveness as a species played a part in this calculated plot turn, and it's worth acknowledging our perfidy. But this ending strikes me as just grotesque, a writerly trick, which reads as a message that he can do whatever he wishes with his book. Well, we as readers can't but grant him this power. But to my way of thinking, what he has done is mar a dark and beautiful creation with something unnecessary and ugly.

I was assigned this book for review through Book Browse. The story of Ruthie Fear growing up in a beautiful wilderness being overtaken by creeping urbanization and environmental changes is an interesting read,. The early parts of Ruthie's life are shaped by her father's s belief in individualism and disdain for organized society. Being raised by a man who has limited if any kindness in him and no interest in tempering his daughter's development with any female influence, Ruthie grows up shaped by her relationship with nature and animals and with an essentially male world view. As a result she makes choices more on instinct than reason. The community in which she is raised forms an important part of Ruthie's identity. She is a most unique character to say the least. While the book is beautifully written and has an ending that is a bit of a surprise, unfortunately it just didn't resonate with me.

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers who gave me an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

If "Ruthie Fear" by Maxim Loskutoff is not on your "to-be-read" book list, it needs to be. Loskutoff creates very visceral, complex characters set in a wilderness that is so evocative and expressive that it becomes easy to submerge oneself in the pages.

The novel follows Ruthie Fear from the age of six to her early thirties as she attempts to find herself amidst the violence which surrounds her and the wildlife that is constantly changing. Through Ruthie's eyes, we see life in Bitterroot Valley, Montana, full of people who feel beaten down by life and are struggling to make something of themselves, a community changing to the modernity of the world, and the strange appearances of creatures that have haunted Ruthie since she was a little girl.

I absolutely loved this story. It was very rich in detail that made Bitterroot Valley feel like it could be anyone's home due to the level of depth put into its history. Not to mention the character's reaction and perceptions of the ever-changing natural world of their community felt very tangible and wholesome. It reminded me a lot of stories like "Hold the Dark" by William Giraldi and "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson because the stories are so complex and deeply rooted in the community and wildlife that it is almost impossible to not fall in love with the writing.

"Ruthie Fear" is highly recommended. This novel is anything but dull and slow-paced, and I can guarantee that readers will be immersed in Ruthie's tale as it unfolds.

A story about a young girl growing up in a trailer in the Bitterroot Valley, just South of Missoula, Montana. Raised by her father when her mother abandons them, she alternates between absorbing his values and lifestyle and wishing she could have almost any other life. We follow her from age six through her early thirties as she tries to find her place in the world.

The book is beautifully written, evoking the wild beauty of the valley, surrounding mountains, and wildlife as well as depicting small town Montana life amid a sea of changes. We see the world through Ruthie’s eyes as she struggles to reconcile the violence and injustice that she abhors with her own inner darkness and the natural and man-made disasters that beset the Valley.

The overall tone of the book is (to me) depressing. Her perceptions of most (not all) of the men around her is as pathetic, angry, and beaten down by life. The story is a slow parade of natural and man-made disasters and the impact on the relatively impoverished people around her: fires, a giant earthquake, the mills closing and ensuing lack of work, the incursion of the “California carpetbaggers,” ski areas closed due to warming weather, thousands of geese killed from polluted ponds, etc. She is a constant witness to conflict and violence — against animals and against other people. She observes that much of the anger percolates through the hierarchy of locals: white settlers who have been there for generations, the Salish Indians (the “original” locals), and the constant influx of people who came fleeing someplace else — hippies, polygamist mormons, retirees. Everybody wants the others to disappear and nobody wants anyone new to show up.

The last chapter took a wild turn into left field. I don’t know where it came from, and I can’t decide if it was symbolic or something that was actually happening. I’m going with largely symbolic, but I don’t want to include any spoilers so you’ll have to read it and let me know your thoughts…

Overall I enjoyed reading this book — gorgeous writing, character depth, and a level of detail that made it all so palpable. I would have preferred a more balanced view of life in the area — I understand that this really was one person’s experience, but it painted the area as somewhat hopeless, full of victims who were unable to stem the tide of unwanted change (or adapt to it). It reminded me of Louise Erdrich books which I’ve stopped reading — incredibly beautifully done, but on the depressing side.