Ruthie Fear: A Novel [Paperback]

Winner of the 2021 High Plains Book Award in Fiction and the 2021 Montana Innovation Award Ruthies lawlessness makes her an acute observer of contradictions within herself and in the community, and Loskutoff uses tropes of the Westernvivid depictions of mountain landscapes and hunting scenesto offer a subtle portrayal of poverty and class warfare. Loskutoff depicts the casual brutality of Ruthies coming-of-age, as well as its wild, precarious wonders. His characters are wholly believable, reluctantly adapting to the massive forces shifting around them . Like the exemplars of Western fiction Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner, Loskutoff grants his landscape the agency and complexity of a main character. Loskutoff reimagines the conventional bleak and brawny novel of the Western mountains, mixing magic and realism in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, and introduces a strangely beguiling Ruthie Fear. Loskutoff hones and deepens the unique skill he showcased in his debut&a capacity for human complexity, the talent to hold beauty and ugliness at once. A powerful story about the disenfranchised&Loskutoff neither divides his characters into villains and victims nor presents them as objects of condescension or condemnation. [A]stonishing ... a magnificent novel. On the surface, An original and shape-shifting western parable. A book full of earnest, proud, damaged, and endearing characters, each one chasing their own American Dream. Maxim Loskutoffs writing is endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart. Loskutoff captures the vast and lonely land along with its beauty with breathtaking descriptions of violence and empathy, and ends with a shocking and poignant surprise. With its humor and heart, Loskutoffs harrowing tale offers a heroine to root for. This one hits hard. Maxim Loskutoff takes the real world, the gritty realism of western mountain poverty and class warfare, and turns them inside out, infusing them with the wonderfully stralS>