Contemporary Authors

• Idaho: A Novel Random House (New York, NY), 2017

1. Idaho : a novel LCCN 2016006621 Type of material Book Personal name Ruskovich, Emily, author. Main title Idaho : a novel / Emily Ruskovich. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, [2017] Description 308 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780812994049 (acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3618.U7445 I33 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Penguin Random House - http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/164106/emily-ruskovich

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Emily Ruskovich grew up in the mountains of northern Idaho. She graduated from the University of Montana and received an MA in English from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was the 2011–2012 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One Story, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She was a 2015 winner of the O. Henry Award for her story “Owl.”

• Emily Ruskovich - http://www.emilyruskovich.com/bio/

  Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One Story, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. A winner of a 2015 O. Henry Award and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently teaches creative writing at Boise State University. Idaho is her first novel.

• Boise State University - https://news.boisestate.edu/update/2017/03/21/creating-writing-program-hires-rising-literary-star-emily-ruskovich/

  Creative Writing Program Hires Rising Literary Star Emily Ruskovich
  BY: CIENNA MADRID PUBLISHED 11:00 AM / MARCH 21, 2017

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  Emily Ruskovich portraitThe MFA in Creative Writing program has hired Emily Ruskovich, author of the bestselling novel “Idaho,” as an assistant professor in creative writing. Ruskovich will begin in fall 2017 teaching fiction writing, as well as form and theory of fiction at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She also will serve as an editor with The Idaho Review.

  “We are absolutely thrilled to have Emily join us,” said Mitch Wieland, director of the MFA program. “She is truly a rising literary superstar. Her debut novel is powerfully moving and intensely lyrical. The book is a profound exploration of the mysteries of the human heart.”

  Ruskovich has garnered glowing reviews for “Idaho” by the New York Times and the Guardian, among other publications.

  Ruskovich was raised in northern Idaho and received her MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2015, her short story “Owl” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories. In addition, her short stories and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Zoetrope, The Atlantic, Paris Review and elsewhere. She previously taught at the University of Colorado, Denver. More information about her and her work can be found at: http://www.emilyruskovich.com.

• Boise Weekly - https://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/idaho-beautiful-and-dangerous/Content?oid=4098293

  Hit #1Hit #2
  FEBRUARY 22, 2017 ARTS & CULTURE » LIT

  Idaho: 'Beautiful and Dangerous'
  Raised in Idaho, the author of Idaho is a new literary star
  By George Prentice @georgepren
  Emily Ruskovich grew up on Hoodoo Mountain in northern Idaho—a place of mystery and danger that fuels the story in her debut novel, which is earning reviews often reserved for best sellers.
  Sam McPhee
  Emily Ruskovich grew up on Hoodoo Mountain in northern Idaho—a place of mystery and danger that fuels the story in her debut novel, which is earning reviews often reserved for best sellers.
  click to enlarge
  RANDOM HOUSE - Ruskovich on the cover of her novel: “It’s beautiful, it’s haunting. It answered all of my fears.”
  Random House
  Ruskovich on the cover of her novel: “It’s beautiful, it’s haunting. It answered all of my fears.”
  Emily Ruskovich's voice is exactly what you would hope it to be: soft, lyrical and sweet. Just like her writing. Her insight—way beyond her years—on the many secrets buried deep in Idaho's backcountry is particularly keen. Just like her writing.

  "Idaho is..." she said, taking a long pause. "Well, Idaho is a strange place, isn't it? No place quite like it. Growing up in Idaho was so beautiful, so isolated and quite scary."

  Ruskovich's childhood included living on Hoodoo Mountain in northern Idaho. Sometimes her family went without electricity or running water above the town of Blanchard. It was there her family embraced the mountain's serenity, she said, but they were also robbed several times.

  "We encountered many strange things out there. It was, in many ways, not a safe place for children to grow up. Yet, it was the most ideal place to grow up. My imagination is so strongly tied to Idaho. I love that area, even as I'm unsettled by it," she said. "Beautiful and dangerous."

  It is with that beauty and danger Idaho, Ruskovich's debut novel, is framed. The book has already garnered acclaim usually reserved for best sellers.

  "You know you're in masterly hands here. ... A wrenching and beautiful book," wrote The New York Times.

  "Mesmerizing ... [an] eerie story about what the heart is capable of fathoming and what the hand is capable of executing," wrote Marie Claire.

  "The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life—but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.

  When Ruskovich recently ventured to a grocery store near the tiny town of Alsea, Ore., where she lives with her husband, who is also a writer, she saw the most recent issue of O—the magazine founded by Oprah Winfrey—and opened it to a significant surprise.

  "There it was: My book," said Ruskovich. "I'm not at all used to this."

  Poetry and 'Something Terrible'

  Such praise for the first-time novelist is far from a time when Ruskovich recalled being 4 years old and sitting with her mother on the porch of their mountain home. Not old enough to write or even spell her name, she dictated a poem to her mother: "When the world ends, my heart will be singing/ When the world ends, I will be very sad/ But right now I am sitting on the porch with my mom, and I'm holding a glass of water."

  Beautiful and dangerous, indeed.

  She recalled another moment from her youth that would ultimately serve as the inspiration for Idaho.

  "I remember that my family was gathering firewood on a mountain parallel to the mountain we lived on, so far away from everything. We were putting wood in the back of my father's truck. I remember the crows, the birch wood... it was so beautiful," Ruskovich said and took a deep breath, falling silent for a moment in the memory. "I also found that I was haunted by this place. I had this sense... it was a sense that something had happened exactly there. I felt the possibility of something terrible happening."

  The memory of the mountain, the crows, the birch wood, even the haunting burrowed deep into Ruskovich's subconscious, where it lived quietly for many years.

  She would leave Idaho to graduate from the University of Montana, receive a master's degree from the University of New Brunswick in Canada and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She began publishing short stories, winning the prestigious O. Henry Award in 2015. Her literary influences include Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro and Pulitzer Prize winner and fellow northern Idahoan Marilynne Robinson, who was an instructor of Ruskovich at the University of Iowa.

  "I sold a collection of my stories to Random House, but they were particularly invested in the first story of that collection," she said. "A teacher of mine had told me the same thing. 'This is a novel,' she told me. I was so intimidated. But when my Random House editors expressed a similar sentiment, I forced myself to open up the possibility."

  It was that first short story, drawing on her recollection of life on Hoodoo, that would become the foundation of Idaho.

  "I revised this novel for years," said Ruskovich. "I was strongly influenced by the work of Alice Munro, writing about the depth of experiences from ordinary people. And when I read Beloved by Toni Morrison, I had a new realization of structure; and through the years, my novel underwent major structural revisions."

  By the time Ruskovich put the finishing touches on Idaho sometime in 2016, she concedes that it was difficult letting go of her characters.

  "I went through a period of mourning when I finished the story. The book had become an absolute thing—a living, growing thing," she said. "Honestly? I could probably write this book forever. There was no real end. The perspectives could be infinite."

  During the last few months of 2016, Ruskovich said she finally found what she called some "peaceful months." All of that changed on Jan. 3, when Idaho was published.

  "All of a sudden there was a new anxiety, rather physical, that I had never felt before," she said. "I couldn't catch my breath. Every few minutes, I had to breathe very deeply."

  The next day, Jan. 4, The New York Times was first out of the gate with its seal of approval, likening Ruskovich's work to Robinson (Housekeeping), Rick Bass (Why I Came West) and even Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

  Memories and Unspeakable Violence

  Idaho opens years after something terrible has happened. The mystery unfolds through the eyes of Ann, a northern Idaho schoolteacher and second wife to Wade—a divorcee, loner who is slowly experiencing the creep of dementia. Early on, we learn Wade's first wife, Jenny, killed their 6-year-old daughter May while their other daughter, June, ran deep into the woods of the mountain, never to be heard from again. Jenny is sent to prison while Wade's grief fills his days. Ann becomes the novel's surrogate detective, trying to piece together exactly what happened 12 years earlier. She must also survive her personal hell: Wade's unexplained bursts of violence which include holding Ann's forehead against a wall and, on another occasion, pushing her head into a pile of pinecones and leaving a rash of tiny cuts on her cheek.

  Wade's memories fade, as do the details of what transpired on the day when he, his then-wife Jenny and their two daughters were gathering birch wood on a northern Idaho mountain. Wade shares only spare memories about the tragedy with Ann, leaving it to her to obsess over the critical missing pieces of the mystery.

  Concurrently, Ann lives in fear of Wade's dissolution into nothingness, always wondering what might help trigger a crucial memory from his tortured past.

  "At night, when he was asleep, she thought about these things as she studied the face she loved. His pale eyelids stark on his sun-roughed face. His lips chapped, his cheeks unshaven. Such inherent kindness in his body that it was impossible to picture this man doing the things he had certainly done."
  What follows is a decades-long journey. Not chronological—much like memory itself, the events are scattered over the years until they finally find a place to settle in our consciousness. Eventually, Idaho leads us to Jenny herself and her life in an Idaho prison.

  "The judge's voice was not much louder than a whisper. The sentence was delivered from his mouth but was somehow separate from the man, as if the child voice spoke for him, too. LIFE, he said, as if it was a gift he was bestowing; LIFE. As if the word could make it so."

  The enigmas of Idaho run even to the jacket, which features a thicket of overbrush, thorns and wildflowers.
  "I was shown a number of possible covers for the book that I didn't like. They really weren't emotional enough," said Ruskovich. "Then, our publishing house in England sent something from Christopher Wormell. I loved it. Our American editors loved it. It's beautiful, it's haunting. It answered all of my fears."

  As for the title, there are probably thousands of books or booklets titled Idaho, nearly all of them non-fiction or travel-based.

  "But I always felt that Idaho was the only title. My book had been fully edited, but the review committee had some concern about naming it Idaho, thinking it would be confused with non-fiction. They asked, 'Can't you give us something else?'" Ruskovich said. "But Idaho was crucial. Think of the magnetism of the word. When we got that beautiful, mysterious cover art, everyone agreed that it had to be Idaho."

  When asked about Idaho's not-so-linear timeline, jumping back and forth among the years before landing on a future date in 2025, Ruskovich insists Idaho's time is, much like real life, "not always straight-forward."

  "The dream-like aspect of stepping back in time, and then stepping into the future, well, it all fits the theme of Idaho," she said.

  Idaho, the novel, is not unlike Idaho the state in that it is dense with mystery: in the people we meet, those we wish we had and, of course, the mountains and forests that hold their own never-ending secrets.

• Book Reporter - http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/emily-ruskovich

  Emily Ruskovich
  Emily Ruskovich grew up in the mountains of northern Idaho. She graduated from the University of Montana and received an MA in English from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was the 2011-12 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One Story and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She was a 2015 winner of the O.Henry Award, for her story “Owl.”

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/her-own-private-idaho-an-interview-with-emily-ruskovich-1282ee50c217

  Michelle Lyn KingFollow
  Michelle Lyn King lives and writes in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in Shabby Doll House, Joyland, Brooklyn Magazine, Catapult, and The Fanzine.
  Feb 23
  Her Own Private Idaho: An Interview with Emily Ruskovich
  The author of ‘Idaho’ discusses growing up on the mountain, perseverance, and finding the language to examine a murder

  Author Emily Ruskovich. Photo by Sam McPhee.

  When I began reading Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel Idaho, I thought it was going to be a plot-heavy mystery. The book opens on Ann, a middle-aged woman living in northern Idaho, rummaging through her husband Wade’s truck and thinking about Wade’s two young daughters — June, who has been missing for 18 years, and May, who is dead. From there, the story unfolds not as a thriller, but as a lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and recovery. We learn early on that it was Jenny, Wade’s ex-wife and May and June’s mother, who committed the murder. The book spans over forty years, opening in 2004 and moving back and forth in time, from the mid-1980s, when Jenny and Wade were still together and a happy, young couple to the mid-2020s, when Jenny is released from jail. At the heart of the book is the relationship between Wade and Ann, who meet not long before the murder of Wade’s daughters and begin a romantic relationship shortly thereafter. Ann helps to care for Wade, who is suffering from genetic early-onset dementia, and she works to piece together his life with his ex-wife and two children before he is too sick to remember any of it. I spoke with Emily Ruskovitch over email about why this book needed to be set in Idaho, how she crafted its lyrical prose, and why she set a chapter eight years into the future.
  Michelle Lyn King: In an interview with Salon, you mentioned how your childhood on Hoodoo mountain was an influence in writing Idaho. I would love to hear more about that. How exactly did growing up in Northern Idaho influence you? Why did this story need to be set there?
  Emily Ruskovich: I never made an actual decision to set the novel in Idaho; Idaho was there from the very beginning, from the very first moment I started to feel my way around this story, and in that way, the story and the setting feel inextricable from each other. The feeling I get from these characters is the feeling I get from the mountains of Idaho. It is beautiful and quiet and secret and can also be very scary. The mountain where the Mitchells live is a version of the mountain where my family lived. Our houses look different, but the layout of the land is very similar. The rotting furniture and junked cars the characters find out in the woods were very familiar sights for my siblings and me when we would go exploring the land surrounding our own. It was not a very friendly place in a lot of regards, and it was often quite scary. People were often armed. There was a lot of racism and anti-government sentiment. I remember finding some haunting things out in the woods, and I remember that one day, our half-built chicken house simply disappeared. Even the cinderblocks that formed the foundation, all of it gone. We were in the middle of nowhere, on a property that was incredibly difficult to access, and yet someone had come up in the night to steal every last piece of lumber, right down to the last brick. Another time, very early in the morning, we were threatened by a dangerous man who was waiting for us in our garden, in the dark. These facts are shocking to me, of course, perhaps even more shocking now than they were then. I feel alarmed at them, because, in spite of it all, the mountain remains the place I love most in the world, because it was our place. My family carved out a beautiful and kind place, as many people did, in an otherwise hostile landscape, just as Wade and Jenny did when they were young. Our acreage, like theirs, was strange and beautiful. Streams of pinecones; the tree sap smelled like honey. It was a very wild place, and some of the best years of my life were spent there. There were a lot of wonderfully kind people to be found, if you looked. A couple who made knives for a living, who lived two miles up the dirt road from us, nearly at the top of the mountain, were our dear friends and closest neighbors. We relied a great deal on their help when we first moved there. The anecdote in the third chapter about Wade and Jenny buying the land on the promise that the road would be plowed by the county (because a school bus driver lived even farther up), was something that really happened to my parents. The man who sold them the land told them they did not need to worry about buying a tractor to plow. He spun a story about a school bus driver that didn’t actually exist, in order to convince my trusting parents to buy. So we were in a bind once winter came. We used to have to haul our groceries up the mountain in a sled, just like Wade does in the story. Sometimes we hiked two miles down through the darkness and the snow just to catch the school bus. .
  MK: I wonder if you could tell me a bit about how you structured the novel. The novel spans forty years and provides insight into the lives of many characters, not just the three main ones. Did you know the framework for the book when you began it?
  ER: I didn’t even know at first that this was a novel. The first chapter of the novel was once a stand-alone story that I wrote during my first year in graduate school at the University of Iowa. One of my teachers, Ethan Canin, told me that it wasn’t a story but the beginning of a novel, but I didn’t listen — or, at least I didn’t know that I had listened. I didn’t want to listen. The idea of writing a novel terrified me, and I worried that I would ruin the story that I very much loved by expanding it. But a few years later, when my editors suggested the same thing, I realized that I had been feeling the same thing, too. I realized that ever since Ethan Canin put the thought into my mind, the story had evolved, grown inside of me, almost subconsciously, so that when I devoted myself to it, finally, a couple of years later, many of the chapters came quite quickly, the voices already very real to me, especially that of May, whose voice is the childhood voice of my younger sister Mary. But the first perspective I wrote from, aside from Ann’s, was Wade’s father Adam. It’s strange that he was the one I chose to start with, as he was only mentioned once in the original story, just briefly, and his story isn’t integral to the overall plot, but I feel it’s integral to the feeling of the novel. The scene of him looking for his own home really haunted me. That scene seemed to evoke the tragedy of dementia differently than the Wade chapters. So writing about Adam was a way of writing about Wade, too. Once I wrote Adam’s perspective, the structure of the novel really opened up. I suddenly had a lot of freedom to explore.
  MK: I’m very interested to hear about Eliot’s function in the book. You could have made the decision to never return to him, to have him just be this character that, in a sense, brought Ann and Wade together. I loved that we did return to him. Can you tell me about that decision and his character?
  ER: My husband said something to me about Eliot recently that really struck a chord with me. He said that it was interesting that Eliot had built his whole identity around an absence. The absence of his leg. And what a fragile thing that was to do, to believe that the story of your life began the moment you lost something crucial. I’m not really sure how aware I was of this connection as I was writing, that Eliot has done the same thing that Ann has done, in a way: she has built her life around an absence, around Wade’s pain. Writing about Eliot was, therefore, a way of also writing about Ann. Sometimes Eliot feels the presence of his missing limb, just as Ann feels, everywhere and all the time, the presence of Jenny in her life — the start and end of everything.
  But I was more conscience of writing about Eliot as a way of writing about June. June is the only member of the Mitchell family whose perspective isn’t in the novel. And so writing about Eliot was a way of writing about her. It was a way of getting close to her own vision of herself, without writing from her perspective directly, which I felt I couldn’t honestly do, since she is lost not only to her family, but to the novel itself, which never does provide a clear answer to what happened. But getting so close to Eliot was a way of getting close to June’s love. Eliot’s chapter also opens up the possibility that June is the one who set his backpack on the edge of the dock, that June has committed a mostly-accidental act of violence — violence born of love — by putting his backpack there, which resulted in the loss of Eliot’s leg. And I think this is an interesting and disturbing parallel to her mother’s act of horrific — and also almost-accidental — violence toward May.
  So I feel that Eliot, even though he’s somewhat in the periphery of the main plot, is the beginning of everything, as you said. Without him, there is no Ann and Wade. And without his voice, we wouldn’t have what I think is this crucial access to June.
  MK: Can you tell me about organizing the timeline? What goals does a nonlinear timeline allow you to achieve that a linear one does not?
  ER: I think a nonlinear timeline, in this case, more closely mimics the way memory works, the constant intrusion of the past into the present. I also think that a nonlinear timeline allowed me to write more accurately about the violence of what occurred, because it allowed me to explore that violence somewhat outside of time. It is not a straightforward story, even though at the heart of the novel is an absolute event, an absolute moment in time from which everything else emerges. But the way that event is processed, understood, remembered, forgotten — all of that is very mysterious, and I feel that writing from various points of time, non-chronologically, helped me convey that mystery.
  MK: There are sections of the book set in the not-so-distant future, in the year 2025. I thought this was such an interesting and bold choice. How did your arrive at the decision to set parts of the book in the future? Were you ever encouraged not to do so or did you ever consider not doing so?
  ER: I think that the feeling that exists between Jenny and Ann in the end is more complicated and more intimate than a context can alter. Their interaction is so personal that I don’t think it will matter if the world is different in 2025. Ann will still feel this way about Jenny, and Jenny will still feel this way about Ann. It’s the same as reading a book about the distant past. Even though many of the things people struggle with in those stories are so vastly different than our present day concerns, we still feel for them, and understand them, and empathize with them. We still are them. We love our families. We worry about each other. We fall in love. We feel hope and despair and anger and joy. And those things are untouchable, even by time.
  “We love our families. We worry about each other. We fall in love. We feel hope and despair and anger and joy. And those things are untouchable, even by time.”
  And because so much of Ann’s story is an act of speculation, it makes sense that the novel itself would be speculative in this very traditional sense. Ann is always looking into Wade’s past, but she is also painfully aware of stepping toward her future — her life after Wade. And it’s true that the novel will arrive at its own future, too. It will one day arrive at 2025, just as Ann one day arrived there, and at that moment, the novel will cease to be speculative; that dimension of the book will be lost. But I think that’s okay. I think that’s really interesting.
  No one ever suggested that I change the timeline, and, while I had some nervousness about it at first, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was an important dimension to the novel. The reason I first thought to explore it was simply a practical one: I really needed June and May’s childhood to take place in the 1990s because I myself was a child in the 90s, and I wanted their world to look the same as mine did, so that I felt their childhoods even more deeply.
  MK: What was the research process like for this book? I’m curious to know how you went about researching women’s correctional facilities in Idaho or Wade’s disease. I’d also very curious to know if you returned to Idaho at all while writing this book.
  ER: I didn’t do a lot of research as I wrote. I looked up statutes regarding the murder of a child in Idaho, and information about sentencing in Idaho. This I did online, in a fairly quick search. And I read one book called Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System by Silja J.A. Talvi that was extremely informative and so heartbreaking and shocking. I learned a great deal from it. But I would say that mostly, as I wrote, I just imagined as deeply as I could and hoped that imagining so deeply would mean that I had created something close to what was real. (There is some author who says something like this; a friend quoted it to me once and it really stuck with me. I wish I knew who the author was.) I did learn some things about how a prison is run from my dad, who worked as a counselor at a correctional facility for young people. And, for a brief time, I co-facilitated a memoir-writing class at a medium-security men’s prison. But I have never been inside of a women’s prison. In a way, the best research I did was when my husband and I drove to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pocatello, Idaho, and we just sat in our car in the parking lot, looking at the un-spectacular building that we knew held so much pain and longing, so many stories. It was heartbreaking to see the little plastic slide out in the yard, and imagine the women playing with their children when they visited, trying to make it a nice time for them, trying to be cheerful. We noticed the things that the women would see through the fence — the hills of sage and scrub-brush, the quaint garden that volunteers kept up just outside, and we just stayed there for awhile, trying to picture what it would be like to only know this one view, your whole sense of the world framed by a single window, your whole life defined by a single crime from many years before. It’s been something I have thought about a great deal since I was very young. I’ve imagined deeply, all throughout my life, what it would be like to go to prison, wondering if a person might find some way of protecting her interior life in spite of everything.
  “I’ve imagined deeply, all throughout my life, what it would be like to go to prison, wondering if a person might find some way of protecting her interior life in spite of everything.”
  I can’t quite recall how much research I did on Alzheimer’s disease, but I don’t think it was substantial. I know that I looked up whether or not early-onset dementia was genetic, and at what age symptoms begin to show. I am sure there were a few other facts I looked up, too, but mostly, I felt like facts weren’t as important as the stories I have heard or read, which have affected me so much. Ever since I first learned what the disease was, when I was young, I have paid such close attention to stories about people coping with their loved one’s disease, and I feel that just from listening for so long, that I have learned a great deal. But it wasn’t from any focused research, it was just from years of listening and feeling. It was actually from a work of fiction that I learned the most. I read Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain, and the way she evoked the perseverance of a self — in spite of extraordinary loss — was one of the most moving things I’ve ever read. It had a profound influence on me.
  And, yes, I did return to Idaho as I wrote! I returned many times. My parents were still living on the mountain where the novel takes place, so I spent my summers with them, working on the novel.
  MK: I’d like to end with the subject of language. The prose in Idaho is, in a word, stunning. I kept finding myself rereading sentences over and over again. In many ways, the sentences mirror Idaho’s landscape. It also matches the interior landscape of the book’s characters. I’m curious as to how the narrative voice of the book came to be. Can you please tell me a bit about that?
  ER: This is a really wonderful question, and I am so glad that you thought the language was effective, but I’m not really sure I know how the narrative voice arose. It arose partly because I had such a strong sense of my characters, and I felt their voices and tried to evoke those voices on the page. But it also didn’t quite “arise” — it was something that I had to really work hard on and struggle with. The language was so important to me, and so I did a lot of rewriting, deleting, starting over. It was a very long process. A few of the passages I’m sure I re-wrote fifty or more times, first allowing some poetry on the page, and then pulling it back, and then stepping it forward, over and over again. I never wanted the poetic language to feel indulgent or exploitive or inappropriate or separate of the characters, but rather a part of their understanding of themselves. If I ever felt that I was risking dishonesty by using poetic language, I was very disciplined about getting rid of it. It was a delicate balance to strike: How do you write honestly with poetic language about something that is absolutely not poetic, that’s horrifying and ugly? It’s a very difficult question, and I feel that I managed it only by getting close enough to my characters that the language was a part of their perspectives. I never wrote, in absolute or direct terms, about the murder itself. The murder is explored only through speculation and through memory, both of which are necessarily very flawed, and there is room for poetry in those flaws. It was by focusing on language that I found a way to express the impossibility of ever getting close enough to what occurred to understand it at all.
  “How do you write honestly with poetic language about something that is absolutely not poetic, that’s horrifying and ugly?”
  Also, I pay a lot of attention to rhythm. When I write, I speak. I read every single sentence aloud many times. I have muttered my entire novel to myself more times than I can count. One review mentioned that the language is a kind of consolation to the reader, and I was very moved by that, and hope that it is true. In the novel, there are many questions that are left unanswered, but that was what felt right to me, what felt most real. And so maybe the poetic language is a way of giving the sense of an answer, just a sense of one, that the story itself is unable to provide.

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Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho
Leslie Patterson
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Full Text:
Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho. Random. Jan. 2017. 320p. ISBN 9780812994049. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780812994056. F
Ann and Wade live a solitary life in the mountains of northern Idaho. In his 50s, Wade has early-onset dementia, and
his memory has started to fade. The only good thing about this development is that he begins to forget an appalling
family catastrophe: his first wife, Jenny, now long in prison, brutally murdered their young daughter May with an ax,
apparently with no warning. Their other daughter, June, ran terrified into the woods and was never seen again. This
could be the plot of a psychological thriller, but the awful violence is mercifully muted, and this novel is more about
mood than suspense. The chapters zigzag back and forth from different times in the past to the near future and include
sad scenes of a zombie-like incarcerated Jenny. Unfortunately, the writing is opaque and oblique just when one would
like more clarity and insight into the characters. VERDICT First-time novelist Ruskovich has written a family tragedy
that will be appreciated by aficionados of literary fiction rendered poetically. However, many will find the unrelenting
misery and melancholy just too depressing.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Patterson, Leslie. "Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301220&it=r&asid=fd703310a696864a957ed1b862f0bbbb.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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Ruskovich, Emily: IDAHO
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ruskovich, Emily IDAHO Random House (Adult Fiction) $27.00 1, 3 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9404-9
Ruskovich's debut opens to the strains of a literary thriller but transforms into a lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and
grief in the American West.Ann, a young music teacher, falls in love with Wade Mitchell, the father of two girls in her
school, over piano lessons. That summer, Wade's family is ripped apart by a tragedy that leaves one daughter dead,
another missing, and Wade's now-ex-wife, Jenny, serving a life sentence for murder. Against all odds, Ann and Wade
marry, and she tries to soothe her new husband's insurmountable grief by piecing together what happened that day. Her
efforts are thwarted by Wade's creeping dementia, which has a tendency to turn violent. Ann is left with only the
powers of her imagination to reconstruct an account of the murder, putting her personal safety at risk as Wade becomes
less predictable. Like memory, Ann's shifting vision of that day is fleeting, ephemeral, and imperfect, scattered as
easily as "dozens of blackbirds, startled at nothing." In fact, her emotional porousness might be a key for the entire
novel, which hopscotches across more than 50 years and multiple perspectives to draw connections, parallels, and
portraits of the men and women who populate Ruskovich's Idaho. We also catch glimpses of Elizabeth, Jenny's
cellmate; Wade's fractured recollections of his childhood and first marriage; the final days of May, Wade's murdered
daughter; and, at long last, Jenny herself. Ruskovich builds poetry out of observing the smallest details--moments of
narrative precision and clarity that may not illuminate what happened the day of the murder but which push the reader
to interrogate the limits of empathy. Fans of lush, psychological dramas like the BBC miniseries Top of the Lake or
Broadchurch have their winter reading cut out for them. A provocative first novel filled to the brim with dazzling
language, mystery, and a profound belief in the human capacity to love and seek forgiveness.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Ruskovich, Emily: IDAHO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902100&it=r&asid=e2353f9238e1c41060ffcba35aae4aad.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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Idaho
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p78.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Idaho
Emily Ruskovich. Random House, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8129-9404-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In Ruskovich's beautifully constructed debut novel, Ann attempts to piece together her husband Wade's past--namely,
the murder of his younger daughter, May, by his ex-wife, Jenny, and the disappearance of his elder daughter, June,
which took place years ago, on the mountain where Wade and Ann now live. The book is set in the alluring and
haunting landscape of Idaho, spanning over 50 years, and depicting Ann's obsession and determination to figure out
what exactly Jenny's motives were and just what happened to the girls. Jenny is now in jail, mostly keeping to herself
while serving a life sentence, and Ann is caring for Wade while he suffers from genetic early-onset dementia, training
dogs, and making knives. All the while, Ann and Wade hope that June may still be alive, after 18 years of no news.
With her amazing sentences, Ruskovich draws readers into the novel's world, using a number of well-developed voices
to describe various perspectives, allowing readers to understand the complexities of the story as well as Ann does.
Shocking and heartbreaking, Ruskovich has crafted a remarkable love story and a narrative that will stay with readers.
Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Idaho." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273924&it=r&asid=9db0e3eda311530aea287181120ecc9d.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
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A choice of first novels
Laura Freeman
Spectator.
333.9843 (Apr. 22, 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Idaho
by Emily Ruskovich
Chatto, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 308
Darke
by Rick Gekoski
Canongate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 299
Behold the Dreamers
by Imbolo Mbue
4th Estate, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 382
The End of Eddy
by Edouard Louis
Penguin, 12,99 [pounds sterling], pp. 192
If you go down to the woods today ... That is the starting point for Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, who grew up on Hoodoo
mountain in the Idaho panhandle. A family --mother Jenny, father Wade, daughters May and June--leave their little
house in the big woods and drive a pick-up truck to a clearing where they chop birch wood, squabble and drink
lemonade that attracts the flies. You want them to find something wonderful there. A teddy bears' picnic. A magic
faraway tree. A Piglet. But this is Idaho, not our friendly day-tripping woods.
Nature is vast and hostile. In winter the house is cut off for months at a time, the paths too steep for a snowplough. In
summer you sweat and sweat and tempers frazzle. Leave the windows open and the beetles get in. Then the spiders,
hornets, horseflies, mice, garter snakes and katydid bush crickets. In the night, coyotes scream. Families make homes
in trailers and on lonely farms, but there is a sense that man is only one howl away from wildness. When the heat and
flies and jealousy and suspicion become too much for Jenny, she does something awful and irreparable.
Ruskovich moves through time: the day in the woods, the months and years before, the aftermath. Objects are returned
to again and again as we piece together the evidence: the Styrofoam lemonade cups, the deerskin gloves to protect
against splinters, the hatchet.
It is two parts Donna Tartt, one part Daphne du Maurier. Ruskovich shares the former's unnerving knack for isolating
her characters--on a New England campus, in small-town Mississippi--and the latter's for psychological suspense and
hauntings. Wade's second wife Ann is obsessed with the day in the woods, sitting alone in the truck trying to
understand what Jenny did. Shades of the second Mrs de Winter.
It is a strange, uncanny novel, bewitching and heady. Grief becomes something as limitless as the woods, and Jenny
and Wade in their separate ways--guilty, not guilty, tortured, unknowing--are felled by it.
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Grief is the consuming emotion of Darke by Rick Gekoski, an antiquarian bookseller, writer and academic in his
seventies. Dr James Darke is a retired schoolteacher and widower, laid so low by loss that he wants no part in the
world. He hires a carpenter to change the locks, take away the door knocker and stop up the letter box. He disconnects
the phone, deletes his email account, and has Waitrose deliver to the door. 'I will never go out again,' he pledges:
If I am incapacitated by severe illness or
heart attack, I will abjure the emergency
call, suffer and die. If the house catches fire,
I will go down with it, perhaps put on some
smothering and sizzling music--Stravinksy
perhaps, can't think what else he's good for
--and smoke and barbecue like Joan of Arc.
For company Darke has the canon: 'fucking T.S. Eliot'; 'that frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf'; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and
his humbugging hero Dickens. He used to teach the boys in his sixth-form class 'slouching towards Oxbridge' that
literature was everything:
The Church can't help us, not any more. (I
got a visit from our rather aggrieved chaplain
the first time I said this, when one of the
boys snitched on me.) But good reading of
good literature, I insisted, both to him and
to my boys, interprets life for us, sustains and
consoles us.
He is totally unprepared for the bereavement that no book or poem will soothe. In James Darke, Gekoski has created a
powerful, raging voice. All that counselling stuff about finding joy in grief, light in darkness, taking one day at a time
and cherishing the memories--rubbish. Darke gives you his blessing to swear, hate, wallow, reject help and company, to
be selfish and bitter; and only once you've got all that out of your system can you pick up Oliver Twist and find a new
way to go on.
New life is the theme of Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers. Not any old life: only an American one will do. This is
the American dream, told through the hopes of Jende and Neni, recent arrivals in New York from Cameroon,
determined that their son Liomi will have a better future: life, liberty and the pursuit of a law degree.
Jende gets a job as a chauffeur to Clark, a senior partner at Lehman Brothers; Neni as a nanny/maid/run-around for
Clark's trophy wife Cindy and son Mighty. It is 2007. Note the date. When the crash comes, Jende is thrown on the
mercy of US Immigration: an American nightmare of court hearings, work permits, Green Cards and waiting, waiting,
waiting. Jende takes three jobs in order to pay the rent and his asylum lawyer. His friends, fellow immigrants, who
bought white-picket-fence houses on impossible mortgages, are evicted. Mbue asks how much a man can suffer, how
low will he crawl to be a US citizen? Is this really better than Cameroon? Than home?
It is a rally-paced read, quick-witted, satirical and, when the dream falters, windingly sad. The bonfire of the Wall
Street vanities, eavesdropped on by Jende driving the car between Park Avenue and the Hamptons, is wicked and
satisfying.
Eddy Bellegueule, narrator of Edouard Louis's The End of Eddy, also dreams of something better. He is a slight,
thoughtful, gay child growing up in a workingclass village in Picardy where obesity, illiteracy and aggressive
masculinity are the norm. He is bullied at school--'faggot, fag, fairy'--and beaten at home.
The book has been a bestseller in France, inspiring much op-ed hand-wringing about National Front voters, such as
Louis's parents, who are unemployed, on benefits and wound up about the number of 'Ay-rabs' in the banlieues. It is
starkly, viscerally written, and as a reader you feel every blow and humiliation. And it is suffocatingly horrible. The
violence, dirtiness, spits and smells are the stuff of the most miserable of misery memoirs. When something nasty
happens to the ten-year-old Eddy in the woodshed, I had to put the book down and go out for walk. Too much. The
poverty and wretchedness of Eddy's Picardy make Idaho's big woods seem unexpectedly beguiling and benign.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
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Freeman, Laura. "A choice of first novels." Spectator, 22 Apr. 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498477733&it=r&asid=ed77ac036eafbad97092bc3fde7cc20d.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498477733

Patterson, Leslie. "Ruskovich, Emily. Idaho." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301220&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "Ruskovich, Emily: IDAHO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902100&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. "Idaho." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273924&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. Freeman, Laura. "A choice of first novels." Spectator, 22 Apr. 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498477733&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/books/review/idaho-emily-ruskovich.html
  Word count: 950

  BOOK REVIEW | FICTION

  What Can Explain a Mother’s Murder of Her Child?, a Novel Asks
  By SMITH HENDERSONJAN. 4, 2017
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  Emily Ruskovich Credit Sam McPhee
  IDAHO
  By Emily Ruskovich
  308 pp. Random House. $27.

  With an act of unspeakable violence at its heart, “Idaho,” Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel, is about not only loss, grief and redemption, but also, most interestingly, the brutal disruptions of memory. We first meet Ann, the book’s conscience and sleuth, as she tries to imagine a horrific moment faced by her husband, Wade: “When Ann’s mind opens up again like an eye, what is most startling is how peaceful the scene has become. May, in the back seat, sits with her head down on her knees, perfectly still.”

  The image is Abrahamic, but the act itself isn’t. When we learn that Wade’s first wife, Jenny, killed their 6-year-old, May, we are in the very antipode of a Bible story. Jenny’s is not an act of faith; it is an act of senseless destruction. The other daughter runs away, never to return. Jenny is imprisoned. Wasted and wrecked, Wade marries the emotionally intrepid Ann. She is drawn by his darkness to care for him, a darkness that soon takes the form of a dementia that runs young in his bloodline. The meaning of this is not readily at hand. And as Wade loses his mind — boring holes in the walls of his home like the Swiss cheese of his memory — there is Ann, plugging the holes, bailing out the boat, trying to get at the truth.

  The construction of this truth is the book’s vital energy. Despite large sections devoted to the girls, Wade and Ann, the novel’s central character and cipher is Jenny. We enter her thoughts, but they give us no answers. At most, she worries “that her death won’t matter enough to happen, that she might live forever in this state.”

  There is no outrage more visceral than the grief and wrath we feel for harmed children. We cannot sanction a child’s death without losing a piece of our decency. We need answers. “Idaho” will thwart readers expecting a defining pathology or demon at the heart of Jenny’s act. Even when situated in the mind of the murderer, we find no answer: “Whatever brought that hatchet down was not a thought or an intention. No, the hatchet caught on the inertia of a feeling already gone.”

  But read those last sentences aloud, the chopping “t’s” evoking the finality of the act, ending on the sad, sonorous “n” — brought, thought, caught, gone — and you know you’re in masterly hands here. Ruskovich’s language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that only decency can save us. When that decency expresses itself — in dozens of portraits of a missing girl, in the epiphanies of a prison poetry class — an ennobling dignity begins to suggest that a deep goodness might be a match for our madness. In any case, that’s the best we’re going to get.

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  “Idaho” is also a very Northwestern book. Thoughts eddy here as they do in Jim Harrison’s work, and Ruskovich’s novel will remind many readers of the great Idaho novel, Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping.” But for me, the most winning recognition comes in a late passage evoking Ken Kesey or Rick Bass:

  “The loose skin of a bloodhound is meant to hold the ground. . . . The heavy ears flopping forward at all times create the walls of the trail, a kind of tunnel and tunnel vision, the tips of the ears stirring up the particles on the ground for the wrinkles to gather and hold.”

  Ruskovich nods to the bloodhound Ann, as well as to the bloodhound reader of this wrenching and beautiful book. The next six sentences offer the blunt consolations of nature, what must be done:

  “Off-duty, head up, the bloodhound is a different dog. The wrinkles fall open. The forehead is smoothed, the scent let go. This is how a dog forgets. This is how a dog moves on. He lifts his head.”

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  Emily Ruskovich
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  There are some things that cannot be explained, violence mysterious in origin and obliterating in effect. And if you’re still standing afterward, sometimes the best thing to do is the same as the only thing to do. Indeed, the only way to affirm this life’s goodness is to go on living.

  Smith Henderson is the author of the novel “Fourth of July Creek.”

  A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 2017, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Pieces of Truth. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/idaho-by-emily-ruskovich-review
  Word count: 929

  Idaho by Emily Ruskovich review – the scent of a murder
  Beginning with an unthinkable act of family violence, this moving and profound debut investigates the limits of memory and imagination

  Into the wild … Stanley Lake and Sawtooth Mountains in Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho. Photograph: Alamy
  Into the wild … Stanley Lake and Sawtooth Mountains in Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho. Photograph: Alamy
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  Stevie Davies
  Saturday 4 March 2017 10.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.24 EDT
  In 2004 Ann Mitchell, Wade’s second wife of nine years, sits in their out-of-commission family truck parked on an Idaho mountainside. In this truck, one summer morning in 1995, Wade’s first wife, Jenny, took an axe to her beloved younger daughter, May. The older child, June, fled into the forest and was not seen again; Jenny was sentenced to life imprisonment. Why? What happened? The scene appears set for a murder mystery, with the usual twists and thrills, guaranteeing ultimate gratification of the reader’s thirst for solutions. Emily Ruskovich’s moving and profound debut novel denies such generic satisfaction.

  Within the abandoned truck, Ann recurrently seeks to imagine what led up to the murder. Her quest is urgent now, since her husband suffers from early onset dementia. What Wade has not disclosed may never be communicated: the memories he does retain are obscure. Although the love between Ann and Wade is enduringly passionate and tender, his behaviour is tinged by minor outbreaks of bizarre violence. The scene in the truck is dominated by scent, residual or imagined: a pair of leather gloves Wade kept, perhaps to preserve the trace of the “last smell in his daughter’s hair”; the “smell of grease and honeysuckle”.

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  Idaho is a world of vivid particularity, a collection of evanescent traces and tracks, stains and remnants. Ruskovich presents a landscape of aftermaths and mnemonics: cryptic remains of indeterminate presence. I was reminded of Heathcliff’s speech in Wuthering Heights: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.” People vanish, like a boy Ann once taught who left a smudge on piano keys, a fingerprint on a window. The motif of loss recurs in the poetry of the simplest sentences: “The mountain’s gone.”

  Ruskovich’s human characters keep company with native animals, from moose to deer, from beetles to flies, subject to the same vicissitudes and the one death. The author’s sympathetic imagination extends, movingly, to all animal life, the child who is killed and the fly she may have killed: “Ann sees May, sitting with her hand perfectly still in midair, waiting for the fly to trust her so she can kill it, and then there is a black stop in Ann’s mind.”

  Structurally, the novel is complex, requiring and rewarding a reader’s intent concentration. A fragmented construction zigzags to and fro between multiple perspectives and unchronological dates, from 1973 to 2025 – a mimesis of the lost mental bearings of its characters. Idaho ricochets between images of integration and disintegration, like the “dozens of blackbirds” Ann and Wade watch as they “converge and scatter like a handful of black sand thrown against the sky”. Some narrative angles are tangential to the major story: Elizabeth, Jenny’s cellmate, movingly enters into friendship with the taciturn, wounded woman who murdered her own daughter. Ruskovich’s sympathy extends to all her characters, trapped within their limitations, doing their decent best, mediating for one another, but prey to random compulsions of violence or flight.

  A late chapter is told from the bloodhound’s point of view as its senses are suffused by an explosion of smells
  Idaho is a meditation on the power and limits of the individual imagination, as well as on memory and its aberrations. What can we understand or intuit about other people, given that our knowledge owes so much to subjective guesswork? Ann, labouring to reconstruct the unthinkable murder, recognises her imaginings as a form of fiction, projected on a world of multiple truths.

  After the murder, the fleeing June was tracked, too late, by a police dog. A late, bravura, chapter is told from the bloodhound’s point of view – or rather, from its “tunnel vision”, as, head to the ground, its senses are suffused by an explosion of compound smells. A single scent is scarcely distinguishable from the flood of odours that cross-contaminate. June’s “glove that they’ve held over his snout” conveys too many messages, identifying a multiplicity of sources: “the sweat inside, the deer it was once the skin of … the truck … blood [and] dirty, perfumed hair … the bright zing smell of seeds burst open from pods grazed by a child’s fingertips”. The child’s fugitive trace has perished nearly at source.

  In the final third of the novel, telling becomes excessively fragmentary, resembling short stories in a composite novel. At one point I failed to recognise a character and had to return to the beginning to identify him. That I was prepared to do so speaks volumes for the exceptional quality of Ruskovich’s writing.

  • Stevie Davies’s Equivocator is published by Parthian. Idaho is published by Chatto. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• SF Gate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Idaho-by-Emily-Ruskovich-10840627.php
  Word count: 911

  ‘Idaho,’ by Emily Ruskovich
  By Caroline Leavitt Published 1:34 pm, Friday, January 6, 2017

  "Idaho" Photo: Random House
  Photo: Random House
  IMAGE 1 OF 2 "Idaho"

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  The first thing you should know about “Idaho,” the shatteringly original debut by O. Henry Prize winner Emily Ruskovich, is that it upturns everything you think you know about story.
  Ostensibly it’s a novel about a tragedy — young mother Jenny inexplicably kills her daughter May with a hatchet, while older daughter June vanishes into the woods. Refusing to explain her actions, Jenny is charged with murder and sent to prison. Wade, her grief-stricken husband, is punishingly alone, struggling until he eventually marries Ann, the local piano teacher.
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  You might think that the primary focus of the book is going to be a business-as-usual exploration of why Jenny killed May, or where June is and how they find her. But this novel is much more interested in a deeper, more haunting meditation on love, loss, forgiveness, time and memory.
  “Idaho” begins with Wade and Ann, married many years, their love tested by both the solitude of their environment and Wade’s increasing dementia, something he inherited from his father. They live in the fierce, snowy mountains of Idaho, and in many ways, Ann loves Wade more than he returns it, because she endures his fits of violence and his moments of disconnection.
  The more Wade disintegrates, the more Ann integrates. She’s determined to resurrect all of his memories, especially the ones about the tragedy, to remember his life for him, if she has to, because that might be the only thing to keep them bound together, and to keep him alive.

  Engulfed in her husband’s past, her own present life changes. She begins to have memories from Wade’s little girls themselves, as if she is actually living part of their former lives. More and more, she’s determined not only to discover the truth about what happened but to find June, too, and not just for Wade, but for herself as well.
  Ruskovich dips in and out of various points of view, quilting together everything known about that tragic day. We’re in young May’s head as she pines for her sister June’s attention. We take on the point of view of June, who is pulling away from her baby sister in an attempt to be her own person — no matter the cost. We hear from peripheral characters, like Eliot, a boy June knew, who had a tragic accident himself.
  We hear, too from Jenny, silent and undemanding in prison, taking a writing class, but not for herself — instead handing in the work of her cellmate, Elizabeth, who has lost privileges and is desperate to write. Both women’s lives begin to slowly open up, and Elizabeth discovers that in the dark, unforgiving world of prison, she finds the friend she desperately needs.

  Each character’s voice is real and authentic, rendered with hypnotic precision. But the narrative is hardly linear. Characters weave, bob and crash into one another. Ann meets Tom, who paints portraits of missing people as they might look in the future, sure he can help her find June if he can just create the right image. She uncovers and delves into the life of another June, who has a strange connection to both Wade and to Wade’s daughter, and who sticks in Ann’s mind because, unlike Wade, “she has found a way not to disappear.”
  As Ann struggles to remember, Wade forgets everything, including his pain. Ann becomes the sole keeper of it, recalling all this turmoil for him, desperate to find a way of answering and resolving the questions the past keeps bringing up. How can you continue to hope, and when hope seems gone, what, in the end, might sustain you?
  You could read “Idaho” just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar. There is the sullen, oppressive heat, the lush verdant green of the forest, and the smothering cover of snow. There are “the drippy pines, the mulchy ground.” She startles with images so fresh, they make you see the world anew.
  In one passage, Elizabeth ponders how listening to a new woman play the piano makes her “fold her soul up like someone else’s sheet fresh out of the dryer.” In another Jenny describes “the tangled mat in June’s hair the size of a kitten.”
  “Idaho’s” brilliance is in its ability to not to tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life — but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us. And to do that, Ruskovich reminds us, we need only have “hearts whole enough to know they can break.”
  Caroline Leavitt’s latest novel is “Cruel Beautiful World.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com
  Idaho
  By Emily Ruskovich
  (Random House; 308 pages; $27)

• AV Club
  http://www.avclub.com/review/achingly-sorrowful-idaho-transcends-its-core-murde-246869
  Word count: 475

  The achingly sorrowful Idaho transcends its core murder mystery
  By Caitlin PenzeyMoog @penzeymoog
  Jan 2, 2017 12:00 AM

  Photo: Nicole Antonuccio
  Photo: Nicole Antonuccio
  31

  A
  Idaho

  Author: Emily Ruskovich
  Publisher: Random House
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  Poetic and razor sharp, Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho is a mystery in more ways than one. The decades-spanning narrative is scaffolded on the question of why a mother would murder her child, seemingly randomly and without the intent to do so, and on a central mystery: When the mother kills one daughter, the other daughter runs away through the trees and disappears. No one knows if she died in the woods or still lives, undiscovered by her remaining family. Idaho opens years after this event, when the girls’ mother is in prison and their father has remarried Ann, the character that Idaho spends the most time with. She’s an outsider peering into these events, trying to understand. Living in the home where this other family spent nine years, she finds clues, pieces together hints of information, and spends time in the truck where the daughter died. Her husband, Wade, meanwhile, is in the beginning stages of early-onset dementia, further blurring the truth as his memories become tangled.

  Idaho shifts to his perspective, as well as the perspective of his first wife, Jenny, who we meet serving a 30-year prison sentence. Each point of view is imbued with a strikingly different perspective on the events that connect them. Each is powerfully psychological, as Ruskovich gingerly peels back their respective psyches, regrets, and dreams and each character’s undeniable urge to gaze backward. There is a plot, but it can’t be said that much happens in Idaho. These characters go through their lives, connected by love and tragedy. They walk the same places, specters in an unchanging mountainous landscape, where their lives are played out in temporal blips.

  Idaho is sad, but not despairingly so. Ruskovich’s prose is lyrical but keen, a poem that never gets lost in its own rhythm. Even as the plot can be seen to loosely hang over the murder, most of the chapters are more concerned with a Marilynne Robinson-like emphasis on the private, painfully human contemplation going on inside the characters’ brains. The result is writing as bruisingly beautiful as the Idaho landscape in which the story takes place. Why Jenny killed one child, and where the other might be, are little more than an excuse to study these characters’ motivations and deepest cravings. Ruskovich does this exquisitely.

  For a place to discuss the ending we don’t reveal here, head over to The Last Page.

  Purchase Idaho here, which helps support The A.V. Club.

• Idaho Statesman
  http://www.idahostatesman.com/entertainment/books/article132116824.html
  Word count: 851

  “Idaho” by Emily Ruskovich (North Idaho native); Random House ($27)
  BOOKS
  Idaho native’s debut novel — ‘Idaho’ — is a heartbreaking search for understanding
  BY WAYNE CATAN
  Special to the Idaho Statesman
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  FEBRUARY 10, 2017 8:14 PM

  Some books grab you by the seat of your pants from the first page. Books such as “A Farewell to Arms,” Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “All the King’s Men.”

  The debut novel by Idaho native Emily Ruskovich is one of those books, so do not be surprised if you read that “Idaho” wins the National Book Award or the PEN/Hemingway Award—presented to an author who has not previously published a novel or book of short stories of fiction. Or perhaps “Idaho” captures the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, catapulting Ruskovich among the pantheon of premiere writers with just one book.

  “Idaho” is a mediation about an unspeakable crime, forgiveness, and isolation; it is also a detective story. The main characters, Wade and Ann, are at the center of the story, and through their plights we learn about Wade’s first marriage to Jenny and life with their two children, May and June, who is now missing. Readers will want to learn more about Jenny and Wade’s divorce, and the author provides those answers with great profundity.

  Ann, originally from England, is a piano teacher, and Ruskovich’s prose is as lyrical as one of Ann’s concertos: “When you love someone who has died, and her death disappears because you can’t remember it, what you are left with is merely the pain of something unrequited.”

  But whose death is Wade mourning? The reader will identify the victim early in “Idaho” but will not understand why that person is dead and why the murderer committed the monstrous act with a hatchet. At the point in the novel where Ann marries Wade, moves into his small house and starts giving lessons in their home to adults only, the reader understands why Ann cannot teach children to play the piano.

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  The author also expertly evokes emotion and memories through olfactory senses. In a touching scene between mother and daughter, Jenny states, “May does not have this smell. She knows this … Do I smell like June? No. It’s just nerves.”

  The book is told from several viewpoints and is divided into key years. And like William Faulkner, Ruskovich writes in non-chronological order, with the first three sections of the book taking place in 2004, 2008 and then 1985-1986. The final section is titled "August 2025," which features scenes of forgiveness and additional heartbreak. Through all portions of the novel, Ruskovich’s prose is sublime, but also saturnine, and therefore believable.

  The author also focuses on Wade’s fading memories due to his early onset dementia, and Ann’s curiosity about Wade’s past life, which he will not discuss: “Other details came, slowly, but Wade never did tell Ann the whole story again. Why would he. … ” It is too painful.

  In addition, there is a plethora of Idaho-centric activities taking place throughout the book. There should be—the author was raised in the mountains of northern Idaho. First, the children fill up garbage pails with water and dip into them to cool off from a hot summer’s day: “May’s dress is nearly dry from her swim in the garbage can.” Secondly, Wade raises six hunting hounds and creates custom knives, something a New Yorker likely would not do. Prisoners deliver piglets, and Wade and Jenny live on a mountain, where Jenny finally becomes pregnant with June after she and Wade have attempted to conceive for 10 years.

  Although not at the heart of the book, secondary and tertiary characters like Eliot, whom Ann and June admire amorously, are adroitly drawn. Eliot shattered his leg in an accident on a dock, resulting in the amputation of one of his legs. Then there is Tom Clark, a sketch artist who paints pictures of June. Ann clings to his artistic prowess in the hopes of locating June.

  The key to the novel, though, is Ruskovich’s ability to tie all of the scenes together with a compelling plot structure, unique form and dark mood, which entices the reader to turn the pages so they can understand why someone would perform such a dreadful crime. And it is the final section of the book, which Ruskovich pens with convincing ingenuity, which assists the reader to infer their own denouement.

  Wayne Catan has written book reviews for The New York Times, The Hemingway Review, Idaho Mountain Express and the Idaho Statesman. He teaches English literature at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/why-would-a-mother-murder-the-child-she-loved/2017/01/23/41aa8782-ddb2-11e6-acdf-14da832ae861_story.html?utm_term=.6d58c678f768
  Word count: 804

  Why would a mother murder the child she loved?
  By Alice LaPlante January 23
  Why does a mother kill a beloved child? It is inexplicable. Yet by the end of Emily Ruskovich’s riveting debut novel, “Idaho,” we get sufficient insight into the complex amalgamation of love, darkness and madness in the human soul to approximate a kind of understanding.

  (Random House )
  “Idaho” isn’t exactly a thriller. Yet it’s certainly a page-turner. First, Ruskovich makes us curious about the exact circumstances under which Jenny kills her 6-year-old daughter, and then she keeps us insatiably hungry for why.

  But that isn’t the only mystery in this novel. What happened to Jenny’s older daughter, who ran into the woods after seeing what her mother had done? Why would anyone marry Jenny’s ex-husband, Wade, with full knowledge that he has started to lose his mind? And why does a local loner obsessively paint portraits of one of the missing girls, appropriately “aging” the portrait as time progresses? We get some answers, but nothing is given easily.

  The story is told in a highly fragmented way. The narrators include Ann, Wade’s second wife, a music teacher who accepts his odd courting while he’s still married to Jenny. Wade gets his turn to tell a part of the story, as do Jenny and her prison cellmate, Elizabeth. One of Jenny’s daughters speaks to us, too, in some of the most brilliant passages about sister relationships I have ever read. We also hear from Wade’s father and that mysterious painter, as well as a local boy, a former student of Ann’s, who lost a leg. Even one of Wade’s bloodhounds has his say.

  But Ann’s narrative is what holds the book together. We start and end with her perspective, before and long after her complicated relationship with Wade. She is sharply drawn to his family from the beginning. We learn most of what has happened from Ann’s sleuthing, her careful putting together of clues and her reimaginings of Wade’s now-shattered first family. “Ann married right into that missing Jenny made, right into the darkness Jenny lives in,” observes the painter, who can’t fathom that kind of “love and insanity.”

  Ann remains burdened with guilt for falling in love with Wade while he was still married — although they didn’t exchange an affectionate word until six months after the murder. Her fear that their love contributed to the tragedy “becomes overbearing,” Ruskovich writes. “Sometimes it’s enough to keep her in bed.”

  Author Emily Ruskovich. (Sam McPhee)
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  But this story is about redemption, too. Ann eventually finds herself again — in her music, in teaching, in the community. She composes at the piano, letting go of the pain with each note she plays. “This is what saves her, her ability to transform that first song with her hands into the feelings that she knows and understands, not the feelings of anyone else, not speculation or fear. Her own loss. Her own life. It is a peace like she has never known.”

  About Jenny’s life in prison we know little except what Elizabeth, her impetuously passionate cellmate, tells us. Serving two life sentences for murder, Elizabeth often thinks about her childhood self, an innocent who would have been lost inside “the woman they thought they were putting in prison” if it weren’t for her friendship with Jenny. “A woman who once murdered her own little girl has made possible a kind of love that has kept another little girl alive. A kind of love Elizabeth did not know she was capable of giving or allowing.” In fact, Jenny becomes a kind of saint in prison, patiently suffering her fate while secretly committing acts of kindness to help Elizabeth. “I wish that you would kill me,” Jenny had reportedly said at her trial. “But I should never again be granted anything close to what I wish.”

  If all this sounds a bit chaotic, it is. But it is the chaos of life, exquisitely rendered with masterful language and imagery. You leave “Idaho” feeling as though you have been given a rare glimpse into the souls of genuinely surprising and convincing people, as E.M. Forster would have characterized the inhabitants of this world.

  “Idaho” is a powerful and deeply moving book, an impressive debut that portends good, even great, things to come.

  Alice LaPlante’s most recent novel is “Coming of Age at the End of Days.”

  IDAHO
  By Emily Ruskovich

  Random House. 320 pp. $27

• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/01/19/rural-idaho-family-implodes-after-senseless-murder-child-her-mother/Wm5yWwoSfggFkc1QJLoKQM/story.html
  Word count: 833

  BOOK REVIEW
  Rural Idaho family implodes after senseless murder of child by her mother

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  By Jenny Hendrix GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 20, 2017
  ‘Idaho,’’ Emily Ruskovich’s haunting debut novel, hangs on the inexplicable. Its subject is the thoughtless, almost accidental violence that is dealt us by life and the possibility of living with decency and grace inside those psychic wounds.

  Ostensibly, “Idaho’’ is the story of a murder. Ann, a piano teacher born in Idaho but raised in England, is the reader’s guide through the destruction of her husband Wade’s first family: the killing of his 6-year-old daughter, May, by his ex-wife, Jenny, followed by his older daughter June’s disappearance and Jenny’s imprisonment. To Ann, the act itself seems senseless, a mystery. “Whatever brought that hatchet down was not a thought or an intention,” she thinks. “No, the hatchet caught on the inertia of a feeling already gone.” But Ann, whose very marriage is built on the absence that Jenny’s act created, finds herself obsessed with Jenny’s motivations.

  The novel begins long after the tragedy when Ann and Wade, living on the fictional Mount Iris in Idaho in the home Wade had shared with Jenny and the girls, have already been married eight years. Jenny is serving a life sentence. Wade, meanwhile, has started to show signs of early-onset dementia, so even as Ann revisits the August day of the murder, piecing together its bones from the fragments she’s gleaned and clothing it in details borrowed from her own life, Wade’s unanchored mind leads him to react, sometimes violently, to a pain he no longer understands. Ann takes on the nearly futile search for the missing June, adopting the unhealed scars of Wade’s former life as her own.

  Ruskovich’s prose is immensely seductive, drawing the reader into a narrative that defies easy resolution. The first section unfolds tautly, as though it were a short story onto which the rest of the novel was built in a search for explanation. The subsequent short sections, which move back and forth over 50 years and in and out of various points of view (the two little girls, Jenny, her cellmate, a local boy, even a bloodhound), fill in the gaps of the central mystery and meander, sometimes very far, away from it.

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  But within each section, there are sharp, clear moments of psychological observation. In one, Jenny remembers how her own childhood ended, the way she sees June’s ending now: “[F]or the first several years of her life . . . [e]ven something as ordinary as the blue rolling chair in her father’s office had some hold on her, some whisper of a new dimension in its puffs of dust sent upward by her fists against its cushions. There was an intensity inherent in everything until, one day there wasn’t . . . [T]here was only a knot of longing somewhere deep inside of her, a vacant ache: adolescence. Boredom. ‘It’s why we fall in love,’ Jenny will tell June.”

  The novel is atmosphere as much as it is story. Ruskovich finds a kind of severe beauty in these woods, in trash heaps hidden in the trees, in the burdensome heat of summer, in dripping pines and the smell of wood smoke, in the whine of horseflies and fingers sticky with lemonade. True to its name, this is a novel of place: The characters lives pass almost secondarily, less in what they do than in the private unraveling of their thoughts and dreams within this brilliantly specific rural northwestern landscape.

  Without offering an explanation for the murder at her novel’s heart, Ruskovich strays toward a sort of forgiveness predicated on broken hearts “whole enough to know they can break.” This, too, is grounded in “something beyond all their lives,” in “something in the rocks and soil and the smells of the trees, a reaching arm, a trailing hand.” In a family marred irreparably by violence, “Idaho’’ finds the ability to continue living by making a home in what is right before our eyes, in those details of life and land that remain, regardless.

  IDAHO

  By Emily Ruskovich

  Random House, 308 pp., $27

  Jenny Hendrix is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her work has appeared in publications including The Believer, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Boston Review, among other publications.

• Fredericksburg.com
  http://www.fredericksburg.com/entertainment/book-review-idaho-is-a-literary-mystery-to-be-savored/article_f3b1793d-d461-532a-978a-7d70b068d2fc.html
  Word count: 398

  EDITOR'S PICK
  Book review: 'Idaho' is a literary mystery to be savored
  By ASHLEY RIGGLESON FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR May 13, 2017 (0)
  Idaho
  Idaho
  Début novelist Emily Ruskovich asks readers to consider not “whodunit” but why the crime occurred in the literary mystery “Idaho.”

  Here’s what we know: several years ago, a woman named Jenny murdered her daughter May while the family (Jenny; her husband, Wade; and daughters June and May) was gathering wood in the Idaho forest. The question of what happened to provoke the attack haunts not only Wade but also his second wife, Ann. Perhaps more important, though, is the question of what happened to June, who ran away from the scene of the murder and was never found.

  Ann, whose voice is the first readers encounter in this novel, feels keenly the burden of the mystery and, for reasons initially unclear, cannot stop imagining the crime in hopes of uncovering the reason behind Jenny’s mysterious attack. Solving the mystery of what happened is given additional poignancy and urgency because Wade has begun to show symptoms of early onset dementia when the novel opens in 2004, and soon the only person who knew and loved June (other than Jenny, who is in prison) will forget her.

  While this novel has mysteries at its heart, Ruskovich, rather than relying on a linear plot, utilizes a complex form which has multiple perspectives and moves back and forth in time. What answers the novel has to offer thus unfold slowly, and the complex and multilayered plot means that in terms of genre the novel is less a crime thriller and more a literary delight to be read slowly and savored.

  Ruskovich’s prose style is extremely distinctive. While some may find the writing overly dense, I found the prose to be so beautiful and poetic that it often took my breath away. The novel is finely calibrated and blatantly emotional. Ruskovich proves to be an extremely adept chronicler of a situation few have experienced. She challenges the reader with tough questions about what love means and if, in the end, redemption is possible. This haunting novel is sure to stay in readers’ minds well after the final page is turned.

  Ashley Riggleson
  is a freelance reviewer from Rappahannock County.

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