Idaho (Ruskovich) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
With an act of unspeakable violence at its heart, Idaho…is about not only loss, grief and redemption, but also, most interestingly, the brutal disruptions of memory…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. 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.
Smith Henderson - New York Times Book Review


Sensuous, exquisitely crafted.
Wall Street Journal

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.... You could read Idaho just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar.... She startles with images so fresh, they make you see the world anew. . . . Idaho’s brilliance is in its ability to not 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.
San Francisco Chronicle


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


Idaho is a wonderful debut. Ruskovich knows how to build a page-turner from the opening paragraph.
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram


Ruskovich’s debut is haunting, a portrait of an unusual family and a state that becomes a foreboding figure in her vivid depiction.
Huffington Post


Poetic and razor sharp, Idaho is a mystery in more ways than one.... Ruskovich’s prose is lyrical but keen, a poem that never gets lost in its own rhythm...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.
A.V. Club


(Starred review.) [B]eautifully constructed.... With her amazing sentences, Ruskovich draws readers into the novel’s world...[with] well-developed voices to describe various perspectives.... Shocking and heartbreaking...a remarkable love story.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [S]trains of a literary thriller...transform[ed] into a lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and grief in the American West.... Ruskovich builds poetry out of observing the smallest details—moments of narrative precision and clarity.... [F]illed to the brim with dazzling language, mystery, and a profound belief in the human capacity to love and seek forgiveness.
Kirkus Reviews