Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Amazon.com: For 19th-century novelists--from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James--social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn't Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation.
Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighboring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonorable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm. Within a year, though, her beloved sister Mathilde drowns under mysterious circumstances. And when Mathilde's husband, Carl, returns from the war, he finds his small daughter, Ruth, in Amanda's tenacious grip, and she will tell him nothing about the night his wife drowned. Amanda's parents, too, are long gone. "I killed my parents. Had I mentioned that?" muses Amanda.
I killed them because I felt a little fatigued and suffered from a slight, persistent cough. Thinking I was overworked and hadn't been getting enough sleep, I went home for a short visit, just a few days to relax in the country while the sweet corn and the raspberries were ripe. From the city I brought fancy ribbon, two boxes of Ambrosia chocolate, and a deadly gift... I gave the influenza to my mother, who gave it to my father, or maybe it was the other way around."Schwarz is a skillful writer, weaving her grim tale across several decades, always returning to the fateful night of Mathilde's death. Drowning Ruth displays her gift for pacing and her harsh insistence on the right ending, rather than the cheery one. --Regina Marler
Product Description:
“POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . [A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST’S CAREER.”
–The New York Times
“[A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . . Schwarz certainly succeeds at keeping the reader engrossed.”
–FRANCINE PROSE
Us Weekly
“DEFT AND ASSURED . . . [WITH] STRONG CHARACTERS AND A PLOT LONG ON TENSION AND SURPRISES.”
–Time
“A strong sense of portent and unusually vivid characters distinguish this mesmerizing first novel about horrifying family secrets and nearly annihilating guilt. Drowning Ruth is a complex and rewarding debut.”
–ANITA SHREVE
Author of The Pilot’s Wife
“RIVETING . . . A VERY SUSPENSEFUL TALE, ONE THAT WILL KEEP READERS UP SHIVERING IN THE NIGHT.”
–USA Today
Download Description: Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed.
Subjects: Fiction, Fiction - Historical, Historical - General, Fiction / General, Reading Group Guide, Psychological,
A good book
This book is definitely a good book. Reading it will bring great enjoyment. The writing by Schwarz is superb. Other reviews have described her as a "weaver" of this complicated and intriguing plot, and I think that is an apt description. Each story flows, anchors, and yet depends on every other perspective.
The plot was intriguing. Starting on the end of WWI and the influenza outbreak, Schwarz takes us all the way to WWII--a truly fascinating time period done one better by not allowing every historical shift to press the story. The beginning is remarkable at setting up such suspense and wonder as to what is Amanda's predicament. But I thought some of the twists were lame compared to the rest of the book. Not everything was innovative here, as I was able to guess some plot points. It seemed as though some areas dragged on a bit, while areas were not finished in my opinion (Where did Carl go? Was he really able to just move on like that?). But the ending was justified. The very last section rushes by with a fury that is appropriate for the action taking place.
All that said, I recommend this book. The slow spots are few and far between. But Schwarz's writing is delightfully intriguing. I will read more of her work.
Drowning Ruth
Drowning Ruth
by Christina Schwarz
Christina Schwarz's wonderfully written first novel "Drowning Ruth" was set in the time frame of WWI to WWII. The main character of the story was inspired by an unfriendly, isolated lady that lived near Christina Schwarz when she was a child. She always wondered how she became the person that she was and what were the circumstances of her life. The following novel is a creation inspired by the mystery of that woman.
It is a mystery of family secrets which is so well written that you feel that you are living in their story. It is impossible to put the book down from beginning to end. The lay of the land and the elements of the weather help to set the tone of the story.
It can be a bit difficult to feel empathy for all of the difficulties that the main character Amanda Starkey endures. She is a bit distant and stiff in her narration, and tends to manipulate the other members of her family. I found this novel to be a great example of the pain that can be caused by keeping secrets in a family. Amanda was unable to relieve Carl's and Ruth's pain because she was to ashamed to explain the circumstances of her sister Mathilda's death. As a result, Mathilda's husband Carl believed that she had been unfaithful to him, and Ruth was haunted by the secrets and hazy memories surrounding her mother's death. The first line of the book was "Ruth remembered drowning. "That's impossible," Aunt Amanda said. "It must have been a dream." But Ruth maintained that she had drowned, insisted on it for years, even after she should have known better."
This is the second time that I have read this book. It is one of my favorite stories, and I highly recommend it.
Well, wow.......but then hmmm.....
I really loved this book. So much that I searched out others by this author, which is a rarity for me. BUT, upon reading other reviews of this book, I did agree with some of them - it was slow in the beginning. But OMG the plot twists!!! You cannot ignore how great that was. Overall, Im reading more by this author!
Hoping for more twists
I enjoyed the book, but found myself hoping for a more twisted plot. I enjoyed how the author placed subtle answers to the many questions that kept me turning the page. It was not predictible.
I was hooked
This story about tragic events in the life of a small family is engrossing and well written. Christina Schwartz immediately snags the reader with the character of Amanda, a very complex woman, shrouded in sorrow and mystery. I wasn't sure whether I ever ended up liking her, but I certainly was interested in her life and her feelings.
For a woman whose very life is so tied up in her sister and her parents, whose feelings completely overtake her at times, she has a unique ability to shut down all emotion, and close off the truth even to herself.
After one of the most horrible (yet mysterious) events of her life, she very methodically examines her wounds. "My hand wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Most of the blood had dried and the punctures were small in circumference. Many of them were deep, however. There would be scars, a ring in the meat at the base of my thumb. Who could have imagined such a little thing would have such strength? Who would have thought she would struggle so fiercely? I found my father's whiskey and dabbed a little on my wounds. Then I drank a glass. People said it made you forget."
That's all the reader gets - that's all Amanda allows herself to think. We don't yet know who "she" is - or what the fierce struggle was about. While I wouldn't say that mystery was the only reason I kept reading, the bits of information that are gradually revealed by the author are rationed very well.
Schwartz slips artfully from one character to another, and from first person to third person. She creates believable voices for tragic young women, shell shocked men, and young children.
"Arthur, six, came to full wakefulness as the water splashed into the washstand that stood against one wall of the room he shared with his brother. He stayed still with his eyes closed, listening to the hangers scraping along the rod and the dresser drawers sliding open and not being banged shut. When Maynard left the room, Arthur got out of bed and went in his pajamas to squat beside his city of blocks. He did his best work in the morning, while the bolt on the bathroom door slide open and shut, the water rushed through the pipes, feet galloped down and up and down the stairs, china clinked in the kitchen, and finally the front door slammed and slammed and slammed."
And as with the last book I read, "The Falls" by Joyce Carol Oates, a body of water plays a major roll in the book and is in fact, one of the main characters.
"Released from their ice prison, the waves tossed themselves against the hull with ecstatic abandon, pitching up a fine spray that shimmered in the fledgling spring sunlight. I dipped my fingers in, and instantly my hand ached with cold. That must have been what it felt like, the night I drowned."
In summary, I guess I would say that "Drowning Ruth" is a great mix of a book you don't want to put down, and moments of very insightful character development. I would certainly pick up another of Schwartz's books.
