The arc of a woman's life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning. Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness?
It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth ... Many delights ... Ruth doesn’t speak to us directly, but Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible ... Delightful buoyancy ... The novel offers us life as seen through slits in a picket fence: We catch bright, sometimes hilarious moments, but the continuity of Ruth’s experience is splintered ... Many graces.
Much of the book’s quirky humor comes from Riley’s deadpan tone and her juxtaposition of odd details ... Grapples with free will and with valuing the collective over the individual ... What a strange and wonderful book this is — emphasis on the strange. No, wait — emphasis on the wonderful.
There are inklings of greatness ... It isn’t easy of access and won’t be to everyone’s taste ... Defiantly strange ... I respect this novel enough to say this in criticism: The reader waits for a second act, for a deepening or a new chord to appear, and it never quite does. Ruth begins to flatten about two-thirds of the way through. You end this novel swimming in the same water you entered ... Is in touch with the oldest and darkest things in our makeup, yet revels in a very modern sense of what Riley calls 'brainy female despair.'
