New York Times Book Review:
What Can Explain a Mother’s Murder of Her Child?, a Novel Asks
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.
“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.”
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.
San Francisco Chronicle
Shatteringly Original Debut
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.
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.”
The Independent
That an act of such brutality inspires storytelling as beautiful as this is reason enough for this debut novel to stand out
In the middle of summer, somewhere on a forested mountain in the wilderness of Idaho, without warning or provocation, a mother kills her six-year-old daughter May with the swift, unanticipated swipe of a hatchet. May’s sister, eight-year-old June, “terrified of what is possible now”, turns and flees deep into the trees. The girls’ father, Wade, is stunned – one moment, one act of unimaginable violence, and his life implodes; each of his familylost to him: Jenny to a life sentence for murder; May six feet under; and June missing without a trace.
It’s a set-up that reads straight out of the darkest of psychological thrillers, the rural surroundings – the seasonal changes of which Emily Ruskovich uses to great effect, from sticky summer days to long, lonely snowed-in winters – reminiscent of the mysteries of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, but what Ruskovich actually does with her material is decidedly more daring.
Why? That morning, Jenny dressed her little girl in long pants. She knew that while she and Wade chopped the wood they were collecting, the girls would be tumbling around in the long grass. She was “worried about her child getting snakebitten or sunburned the very day she killed her”. What makes an otherwise sweet-tempered, loving mother do such a thing?
Readers looking for answers will be disappointed, but Idaho is a much better novel because of what Ruskovich doesn’t tell us. Its subject is the murky ground that must be navigated after the fall of the blade, “the hatchet caught on the inertia of a feeling already gone”: a landscape of loss, grief, punishment, and perhaps even redemption. It’s also a story about the permutations of memory. As Wade loses his, falling prey to the same early dementia that killed his father before him, his second wife, Ann, becomes the gatekeeper of his past. Although Ruskovich utilises a chorus of voices to tell this tale, which spans more than half a century – from murderer through victim, players with only walk-on parts, even the ruminations of the bloodhound initially set on June’s trail that fateful day in the forest – it’s Ann who provides the central consciousness of the novel, a host to memories that are and aren’t hers, following “a secret trail of lost images, real and imagined”.
That an act of such brutality inspires storytelling as beautiful as this is reason enough for this debut novel to stand out from the crowd. To discover the sheer exquisiteness of Ruskovich’s prose is an unforeseen added bonus, one that confirms the distinctiveness of her talent. There’s a rare, rich plangent quality to her sentences, as present in the spaces between the words, in what’s not said, as much as in what is articulated. As when Jenny, after weekly poetry classes in prison, suddenly realises that a new language is available to her, “the language between words”. Meaning – and if not forgiveness itself, something akin to it – we learn, can also be found in absences, in silences, and in not knowing.
Meditation on the power and limits of the individual imagination
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”.
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.
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.
The Guardian
Kirkus Review starred review
Lyrical Meditation on Memory, Loss, and Grief
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.
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.
Shelf awareness
the Possibilities of Love and Forgiveness
Idaho, the first novel by O. Henry Award winner Emily Ruskovich, is a gorgeously designed immersion into the best and worst of life. In rural Idaho, a jumbled family rearranges itself painfully, trying to live on after a great loss. In 2004, Ann Mitchell surveys the Idaho farmstead she shares with Wade, her husband of eight years. Her recollections introduce the reader to their marriage--troubled by the diminishing strength of Wade's memory and a terrible tragedy at the beginning of their relationship. She plays the piano; he makes finely crafted knives by hand. They tiptoe around the past.
In 2008, a woman studies her new cellmate at the Sage Hill Women's Correctional Center. Jenny Mitchell doesn't talk much. Neither of them has much future, with one distant chance at parole between them. Tentatively, they explore friendship, but Jenny doesn't talk about her marriage to Wade, or her daughters. Then, Idaho flashes back to the 1980s and '90s, when Wade was still married to Jenny and both of their daughters were still alive.
As decades are revealed, Wade's family lives through happy, tragic and minute experiences. In layers of disjointed chronology and varied perspectives, the reader slowly picks apart the story: Wade's love for one woman and then another; his luckless family history; the moment in time, the loss of control, that redirected these lives and more.
Ruskovich's prose is exquisite. Music halts "like an animal at a gate, a child at a word it doesn't know." Her expressions of love, in its clean and messy incarnations, are singular, and she handles Wade's mental decline and a child's piano lesson with equal care and clarity. "On a sunny fall day, she lay next to him on the ground, and as he dozed she felt his old life, his memories, radiate off his skin. She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time." That point in time is what Ruskovich does best: sharp, clear moments alongside emotional enormities so great they can only be felt, not explained. This care, detail and realism applies to the novel's background as well as to its stars. For example, a side plot involving an artist who paints meticulous age-progressions of missing children offers poignancy and attention to detail, and is worthy of its own novel.
With lovely language and piercing pathos, Idaho focuses on the power of love and the possibilities of forgiveness and memory. This debut novel deals blows as large as life.
IDAHO ponders unfathomable tragedy and its aftermath
The heinous life events that gut humanity and leave people asking why are all too familiar. A brutal assault, an abduction, the murder of a child — the list is too numerous and depressing to compile.
These events can leave people stunned, grasping for answers that might never come. That void of understanding is at the heart of Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel, Idaho. Ruskovich, a 2015 O. Henry Award winner for Owl, builds her story around the implosion of the Mitchell family after Jenny murders her younger child, May, and the older daughter, June, is lost in the woods. Wade Mitchell is the lone survivor of the carnage, but his memories are being claimed by dementia.
And even the memory doesn’t provide a definitive answer to the question of why a mother would kill a child on an ordinary afternoon out with the family. It’s that sense of the ordinary, somehow always just a beat or two off, that makes Idaho a compelling tale.
Ruskovich’s writing is vivid and dense. She’s telling stories — there are strong subplots woven through the tale — that need to be told, but not necessarily resolved. After all, can society ever really resolve the death of a child at her mother’s hand?
Instead, Ruskovich follows the blurred lines that make up life, rather than the resolutions that make up fiction.
Ruskovich, who grew up in northern Idaho, has chosen this region as her setting. Her narrative is gritty and dark. Years later, May’s murder and June’s terror-filled disappearance are still too raw to be discussed. This isn’t a story about the mental state and psychological baggage that drive a mother to kill her child. It’s about the aftermath and the search for a new normal.
Less than a year after May’s death, Wade marries Ann, a music teacher who had been teaching him piano. It’s not a marriage of convenience, but there are some elements of obligation and responsibility. Wade, whose father was in his 50s when he died as a result of dementia, is beginning to exhibit symptoms and Ann promises to take care of him.
Their relationship and May’s death drive the story. It’s a rich story as Wade and Ann grapple with the omnipresent grief from May’s murder and June’s disappearance, as well as his descent into dementia.
His reactions to Ann and treatment of her can be as gut-wrenching as they are tender.
The story is told from several points of view — Ann, Wade, Jenny and the girls are joined by compelling secondary characters like Jenny’s prison cellmate. For her part, Jenny accepts responsibility for her act, but her subsequent behavior is as murky as her actions on that fateful day.
Rather than trying to excuse an inexcusable act, Ruskovich focuses on how people cope in the aftermath. Her narrative is wonderful as she looks at the ripple effect May’s murder had on those closest to the events of the day. She goes beyond the boundaries of the family, reflecting on how tragedy can prompt even those on the periphery to re-examine their lives.
Much of the story is told from Ann’s perspective. She gets glimpses of family from Wade’s memories. As his mind fades, his memories become hers. Her anguish over the loss of Wade’s mind before his death is heartbreaking. So too is the phase when Wade understands that he is slipping away.
Jenny’s life in prison is also a striking narrative as Ruskovich is careful not to make Jenny, or any of the women in prison, a cliched inmate — hard-boiled characters always searching for a fight or saints whose eyes have shed their scales.
Idaho is a wonderful debut. Ruskovich knows how to build a page-turner from the opening paragraph.
Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Publisher's weekly starred review
A Remarkable Love Story
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.
Complicated Life of Murderess Plays Out in IDAHO
Why does a mother kill a beloved child? By the end of Emily Ruskovich’s riveting debut, we get sufficient insight into the complex amalgamation of love, darkness and madness in the soul to approximate a kind of understanding.
“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.
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.
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. Jenny becomes a kind of saint in prison, patiently suffering her fate while secretly committing acts of kindness to help Elizabeth.
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.
“Idaho” is a powerful and deeply moving book, an impressive debut that portends good, even great, things to come.
The Journal Gazette
The Idaho Statesman
A Heartbreaking Search for Understanding
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.
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.
The AV Club
Writing as Bruisingly Beautiful as the Idaho landscape
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.
Why would a mother murder the child she loved?
In 2008, a woman studies her new cellmate at the Sage Hill Women's Correctional Center. Jenny Mitchell doesn't talk much. Neither of them has much future, with one distant chance at parole between them. Tentatively, they explore friendship, but Jenny doesn't talk about her marriage to Wade, or her daughters. Then, Idaho flashes back to the 1980s and '90s, when Wade was still married to Jenny and both of their daughters were still alive.
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.
“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.”
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.
The Washington Post
"[A] devastating debut novel...a textured, emotionally intricate story of deliverance...[Characters ] are drawn with empathy and pscyhological care; the result is a completely immersive world. Ruskovich allows her characters deep and active imaginations, imbuing them with dignity and humanity. Each has the power to break your heart.
And Idaho is rich not just with plot but with language. Ruskovich's soothing style contrasts with and serves to amplify the unspeakably brutal act at the story's core. Love, too, is described with an intensity that makes the pulse race, especially when seen through the complicating lens of one partner's memory loss: "She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time." Ruskovich's writing is a deft razor, able to etch the finest of distinctions and truths.
The novel's defining act happens in a split second, yet its aftereffects reverberate so profoundly, they echo beneath every word and between every line of sharp prose. Idaho makes a convincing argument that no one is ever blameless, nor beyond redemption.
Haunting Debut Novel Hangs on the Inexplicable
O, the Oprah Magazine
‘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.
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.
The Boston Globe