Ruthie Fear

Starred review from June 29, 2020
Loskutoff’s superb debut novel (after the collection Come West and See) sets a revisionist contemporary western in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Ruthie Fear is abandoned as a toddler by her mother and raised by her father, Rutherford, a man “angry at the rich, the government, and Ruthie’s departed mother in varying order and intensity.” One night, on the outskirts of No-Medicine Canyon, six-year-old Ruthie and her dog, Moses, see a terrifying headless creature. She and her friend Pip then spend years searching for this “wrongness in the woods.” As earthquakes, mudslides, and droughts make Ruthie feel “shadowed by violence,” mill jobs dry up, and developments and mansions are constructed, creating brutal divides among the rich and poor, the whites and Salish natives, and the “arrogant” scientists who work at a local lab and look down on the “uneducated rednecks” who live in trailers and spend their money on machine guns. At 15, Ruthie, still obsessed with the headless creature, attends a protest at the lab, where she imagines evil, unnatural deeds taking place. 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.

July 1, 2020
The mundane and the extraordinary converge in this novel of one Montana woman's life. Neither Loskutoff's novel nor the character who inspires its title is easy to summarize. To say that this book covers several decades in the life of its protagonist and tracks her shifting bonds with her father and some of the other residents of a rural Montana town would be accurate. That description wouldn't get at the mysteries that this book contains, nor would it properly encapsulate the memorable contradictions held by Ruthie herself. The early pages introduce Ruthie as a child, raised by her father. At the age of 5, she sees a bizarre creature in a nearby canyon. "A tall feathered thing, it lurched toward the creek on two long, spindly, double-jointed legs." Even more alarming is the fact that it lacks a head. This intrusion of the uncanny into an otherwise realistic novel is the first indication that Loskutoff is willing to take this narrative into unexpected places. A number of other scenes, though more overtly realistic, offer a similarly dizzying experience. One, in which a high school-aged Ruthie is caught in a violent incident, is harrowing for its suddenness. Omens and dreams punctuate the novel, including a particularly vivid dream involving moss and dead skin. An early reference to "her short life" hints at something terrible to come for Ruthie--but the arc of this novel is anything but predictable. Its conclusion represents a bold and potentially divisive decision on Loskutoff's part--but ultimately a powerful and evocative one that casts a number of earlier scenes in sharp relief. With resonant characters and a great sense of place, this novel rarely goes where you'd expect, and is stronger for it.

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Starred review from September 1, 2020
Montana author Loskutoff follows his short-story collection, Come West and See (2018), with a debut novel in the singular voice of one Ruthie Fear. Her life story coincides with the unraveling of the small-town, insulated culture of the Bitterroot Valley at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ruthie is raised by her father in bachelor squalor while her affinity for wildlife and all animals is challenged by her dad's dedication to guns and hunting. As rich people and developers move into the valley, young Ruthie, her father, and his friends, including Salish Native American brothers whose perspectives are at once tragic and ironic, see their independent lifestyle and ability to freely roam the land dwindling, which leads to rage and despair, violence and pain. Ruthie's life as an adult begins with a hopeful but ultimately disappointing foray to her idealized paradise of Las Vegas. She returns home with her clear-eyed autonomy, generous spirit, and violent, resentful streak intact as she bears witness to the contradictions and strange forces associated with an ominous laboratory and weird creature sightings that Loskutoff sets in motion in this section of the rapidly changing West.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)