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Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

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The book is apparently a character study not a mystery. If it was a mystery maybe I would finish it. The characters that we study I personally hate and do not care about. The main character Anne is giving wierdo in love with a student. Does not help that both the student and her future husband have disabilities. This weirdness is multiplied by the fact that we are never shown anything positive about the relationship with Wade she just keeps telling us about her martyr love for him even though he has dementia and is violent. Is that what she is getting off on? Is it obsession with a tragedy? Anyway. I hated her pov...

chelseymachin's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

alienclans's review against another edition

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4.0

This is the kind of book that I wish I had written. Partly because it's absolutely beautiful and partly because then I would know what happened. I have ideas but that's not the "point" of this book. This book keeps everything vague because it's not a mystery novel. It's a character study. How does one event affect the lives of a family and everyone they meet? The guilty party is never revealed. The crime itself isn't even revealed. I really liked this approach because it didn't have any sort of crutch to fall back on. It was just beautiful writing from beginning to end. Ruskovich created the perfect lonely, isolated atmosphere full of grief and melancholy. I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so sad. It's not a tear jerker but it hurts to read. Wade's memory loss and Ann's aging really felt like a punch in the gut.

annamuss's review against another edition

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2.0

Did not finish. Just did not care enough.

bookish_houseplant's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

lambsears's review against another edition

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5.0

A mesmerising read, written in language that is extraordinary in it's richness and ability to evoke the landscape - which is itself so detailed as to be almost another character in the book. Idaho is beautiful, and sad, and thoughtful and will probably stay with me for quite a while.

Not written in a linear fashion, nor recommended for those who like their i's dotted and their t's crossed, the novel examines memory, love, families, loss and grief in a slightly startling way, through an event of a summer's afternoon on a remote mountain.

Highly recommended.

vegantrav's review against another edition

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3.0

Idaho is one of the most gorgeous books I've read in the past few years. Emily Ruskovich's prose is mesmerizing. Reading this book is looking at beautiful paintings; it is eavesdropping on the lives of the characters: we come to know them deeply and intimately--such that we are almost uncomfortable seeing their nakedness. Ruskovich's descriptive ability is superb. We readers inhabit the landscapes of this novel and the souls of its characters.

Yet as awed as I am by Ruskovich's brilliance as a writer, the story left me cold.

Spoiler

So much of what we want to know remains unanswered. Why did Jenny kill May? Was Ann's speculation accurate? But Ann's guess (that Jenny was jealous of Ann) doesn't really make sense: why would a jealous Jenny kill her daughter instead of her husband? And why did Jenny kill May at the precise moment that she did? What set her off? And what happened to June? It seems impossible that she could have so completely disappeared: if she had died in the woods, surely some traces of her body would have been found by the searchers and their dogs. So, was June kidnapped? We just don't know. With these mysteries unanswered, there is a glaring and profound hole in the lives of the main characters.

. This is a novel where we learn early on who did what and how, and that's fine, but

Spoiler

we want to know more than just the bare facts. In a character study like Idaho, we want to understand why what has happened has happened, what the characters' motives were, and how they rationalized their actions afterwards, but all we really get are Ann's speculations. Idaho is a perfect example of a slow burn, but it's a burn that never really develops into a warm, full-bodied fire, and so it ultimately left me cold, left me wanting more

. As wonderful as the writing of this novel is (and it is phenomenal), the novel itself proceeds so slowly and the problems with the plot are distracting enough that I did not like this novel as much as I feel I should have granted the author's skills as a writer.

This is a novel that I could not recommend to my friends who read more popular fiction because I know that they would be bored by it. And that's really a shame because it's so rare to find a writer who can so beautifully craft her sentences and so vividly bring her characters to life, but the plot itself will be disappointing to many readers. So as much as I enjoyed reading this novel, I can say only that I liked it, not that I loved it.

cornmaven's review against another edition

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3.0

The aftermath of an out of the blue murder of young child by a mother is explored, going back and forth between past and present.

It was compelling. The writing was wonderful, but I knocked it down a star because it got really weird at the end as Ruskovich got more literary and less understandable in her tale. There were parts that to me were incomprehensible just because of the manner in which words were strung together, and some went nowhere. A couple of characters appear and a lot of time is spent on them, but I couldn't understand why.

We never really understand why Jenny did what she did, which was disappointing. But maybe that was the point - people can do horrific things at the drop of a hat and then have to live with the consequences forever. Ann's relationship with Wade figures strongly into the narrative of that moment, but still didn't convince me enough.