"Ruthie’s lawlessness makes her an acute observer of contradictions within herself and in the community, and Loskutoff uses tropes of the Western—vivid depictions of mountain landscapes and hunting scenes—to offer a subtle portrayal of poverty and class warfare."— New Yorker
"Loskutoff depicts the casual brutality of Ruthie’s coming-of-age, as well as its wild, precarious wonders. His characters are wholly believable, reluctantly adapting to "the massive forces shifting around them"."— Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal
"Like the exemplars of Western fiction Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner, Loskutoff grants his landscape the agency and complexity of a main character."— Regina Marler New York Review of Books
"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."— National Book Review
"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."— Yardenne Greenspan Ploughshares
"A powerful story about the disenfranchised…Loskutoff neither divides his characters into villains and victims nor presents them as objects of condescension or condemnation."— Donna Henderson Harvard Review
"[A]stonishing ... a magnificent novel."— Sarah Rachel Egelman Bookreporter
"On the surface, Ruthie Fear is a coming-of-age story that explores poverty, violence and death. But below that surface lies an examination of the shifting demographics of western Montana, where a largely white, working-class community is being displaced…even as their own world slowly implodes from poverty and climate change—and supernatural forces."— Gabino Iglesias High Country News
"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 Loskutoff’s writing is endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart."— Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs
"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, Loskutoff’s harrowing tale offers a heroine to root for. This one hits hard."— Publishers Weekly (starred and featured review)
"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 strange. The ancient mountain wilderness becomes a violent ecotone between two worlds that cannot coexist, and we see the inevitable catastrophic clash through the eyes of a fascinating new young hero in American fiction."— Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane
"A brilliant, gritty, and poetic novel. In Ruthie Fear, Maxim Loskutoff explores the ongoing exploitation and destruction of the natural beauty and wildlife of the American West with one of the most vivid, honest, and heartbreaking characters to appear in fiction in the last few years."— Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff
"Ruthie Fear yanks you into its urgent world, where wildness is an endangered species and wilderness is being fenced off and paved over. Maxim Loskutoff’s debut novel walks a line between the dirt and bone of the earth and the hazy nightmares of myths. Written with love and precision, this book will cling to you long after the last page."— James Scott, author of The Kept
"Meet Ruthie Fear. Once you know her, you’ll never forget her. Maxim Loskutoff maps Ruthie’s Bitterroot Valley with clarity, wisdom, and tenderness, tracking the shifting relationships between those who originally inhabited the land and those who have colonized it, those who hunt and those who are hunted. This novel will seize you by the throat from its very first pages and leave you gasping for air by its end."— Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
"Maxim Loskutoff writes the various violences of the contemporary American West (development, extraction, racism, misogyny, and guns, guns, guns) unapologetically, unromantically, and with a razor-sharp clarity that’s like a punch to the gut. The novel not so much centers around as conjures itself out of the fierce, tender wolf cub of a girl at its center who receives, exposes, incorporates, and transmogrifies that violence. I want Ruthie Fear on my side as we descend into whatever comes next."— Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness
"A ferocious, unsettling, raging storm of a novel that captures not only a place of hauntings and heartbreaks but also a world on the precipice. This is a symphony on fire, a call for us to be better—a beautiful, glimmering song."— Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters
"The mundane and the extraordinary converge in this novel of one Montana woman’s life. … With resonant characters and a great sense of place, this novel rarely goes where you’d expect, and is stronger for it."— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 2020-06-17
The mundane and the extraordinary converge in this novel of one Montana woman’s life.
Neither Loskutoff’s novel nor the character who inspires its title is easy to summarize. To say that this book covers several decades in the life of its protagonist and tracks her shifting bonds with her father and some of the other residents of a rural Montana town would be accurate. That description wouldn’t get at the mysteries that this book contains, nor would it properly encapsulate the memorable contradictions held by Ruthie herself. The early pages introduce Ruthie as a child, raised by her father. At the age of 5, she sees a bizarre creature in a nearby canyon. “A tall feathered thing, it lurched toward the creek on two long, spindly, double-jointed legs.” Even more alarming is the fact that it lacks a head. This intrusion of the uncanny into an otherwise realistic novel is the first indication that Loskutoff is willing to take this narrative into unexpected places. A number of other scenes, though more overtly realistic, offer a similarly dizzying experience. One, in which a high school–aged Ruthie is caught in a violent incident, is harrowing for its suddenness. Omens and dreams punctuate the novel, including a particularly vivid dream involving moss and dead skin. An early reference to “her short life” hints at something terrible to come for Ruthie—but the arc of this novel is anything but predictable. Its conclusion represents a bold and potentially divisive decision on Loskutoff’s part—but ultimately a powerful and evocative one that casts a number of earlier scenes in sharp relief.
With resonant characters and a great sense of place, this novel rarely goes where you’d expect, and is stronger for it.
