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A review by thetomatowriter
The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
3.0
This book was slow to get into. I mean, REALLY slow. It's also written a bit like a memoir and sometimes skips around a bit at the beginning, which can be a little challenging to follow. The setting doesn't really help much, the 1970s in a very small town that seems kind of out of touch with the rest of the country. One thing that DOES help, though, is that there's always a sort of ominous tone to the language, telling you, "Yeah, okay, this seems kind of simple and boring but keep reading because it's about to get intense." Every time I started to think I was losing interest, Ruth would hint that there was a part of the story that she was hesitant to talk about, and I was too curious to give up.
It was about halfway through the book that it really caught my interest, but it gets better from there. The final chapter is one of my favorite final chapters in terms of the writing, and the character's perspective by the end. It did make me uncomfortable at points how even in the last chapter, Ruth tried to defend a certain character, but I think that's very true to her character, and it's something that's addressed. There's actually a part of the last chapter in which she points out that Ruth means "compassion" and talks about how that suits her, because even after everything, she still pities and kind of loves them. A couple pages later, there's a passage that says "I looked up truth the other day. The word has a lot to do with seeing clearly, and with things that are honest and beautiful. Perhaps I should change my name to Ruth Truth. The combination of pity and compassion with honesty and beauty would be a real knockout," and I think that passage pretty much summed Ruth up perfectly.
My favorite part, besides the last chapter, was Ruth as a narrator. Most of the time, narrators of novels are soooo intelligent they're just tortured by having to live around common folk. Introspective, a little bit wanky, honestly. Ruth was the opposite of that. She's told throughout he novel that she's stupid, she struggles as a student and she misses a lot of things that the reader might thing ~everyone knows. I wouldn't call her stupid by any stretch of the imagination, though. Ruth is very observant, often noticing things about the world around her that others don't, or don't care about, and she has a thirst for learning, even if she doesn't learn as quickly as say, her brother. And one of my favorite things about her is how imaginative she is. I've never read anything quite like some of the mental images Ruth conjures up. Ruth is probably one of the most genuinely human fictional characters I've read in a while.
One thing you might want to be warned of, if you're anything like me, is that there is a very graphically violent scene towards the end that lasts for about 4-6 pages. I was warned about it at the start of the book, and that was good, because I don't handle being ambushed by that kind of thing very well, so if you're anything like me, you might want to watch out for that.
Overall, I liked the book. A lot than I thought I would when I started, or even before I read it (I was mostly irked because a reviewer said it was "Dickensian" which made me roll my eyes because not every book in which a child is mistreated by parents and teachers is ~Dickensian, but the reason for the comparison becomes a bit clearer as you read on). It wasn't my FAVORITE, and because of the slowness of it, I doubt I would reread it very often, but I think it's definitely a book that I will remember.
It was about halfway through the book that it really caught my interest, but it gets better from there. The final chapter is one of my favorite final chapters in terms of the writing, and the character's perspective by the end. It did make me uncomfortable at points how even in the last chapter, Ruth tried to defend a certain character, but I think that's very true to her character, and it's something that's addressed. There's actually a part of the last chapter in which she points out that Ruth means "compassion" and talks about how that suits her, because even after everything, she still pities and kind of loves them. A couple pages later, there's a passage that says "I looked up truth the other day. The word has a lot to do with seeing clearly, and with things that are honest and beautiful. Perhaps I should change my name to Ruth Truth. The combination of pity and compassion with honesty and beauty would be a real knockout," and I think that passage pretty much summed Ruth up perfectly.
My favorite part, besides the last chapter, was Ruth as a narrator. Most of the time, narrators of novels are soooo intelligent they're just tortured by having to live around common folk. Introspective, a little bit wanky, honestly. Ruth was the opposite of that. She's told throughout he novel that she's stupid, she struggles as a student and she misses a lot of things that the reader might thing ~everyone knows. I wouldn't call her stupid by any stretch of the imagination, though. Ruth is very observant, often noticing things about the world around her that others don't, or don't care about, and she has a thirst for learning, even if she doesn't learn as quickly as say, her brother. And one of my favorite things about her is how imaginative she is. I've never read anything quite like some of the mental images Ruth conjures up. Ruth is probably one of the most genuinely human fictional characters I've read in a while.
One thing you might want to be warned of, if you're anything like me, is that there is a very graphically violent scene towards the end that lasts for about 4-6 pages. I was warned about it at the start of the book, and that was good, because I don't handle being ambushed by that kind of thing very well, so if you're anything like me, you might want to watch out for that.
Overall, I liked the book. A lot than I thought I would when I started, or even before I read it (I was mostly irked because a reviewer said it was "Dickensian" which made me roll my eyes because not every book in which a child is mistreated by parents and teachers is ~Dickensian, but the reason for the comparison becomes a bit clearer as you read on). It wasn't my FAVORITE, and because of the slowness of it, I doubt I would reread it very often, but I think it's definitely a book that I will remember.