A review by vegantrav
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

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.