The Book of Ruth, by Jane Hamilton

I love this book and recommend to all who need to realize their life is not so bad. This is a story of a poor girl growing up and learning hard lessons in Honey Creek, Illinois. Ruth is the oldest child of May, a woman bitten by life and she seems determined to share her pain. She shows no love or gentleness toward Ruth. Ruth grows up the object of her mother's ignorant uncaring abuse. Her younger brother has the school-smarts to win him a scholarship out of their unhappy home, but Ruth's options are less scholarly. He is the object of Mays undying admiration and Ruth ignores him as much as possible and hates her mothers' obsessive attraction to him.

She finds a job at the dry cleaners where her mother works, spot-staining by day and becoming her team's star bowler at the local bowling alley, the one thing she can do well. She dreams of the stars and frogs, when she picks up a job at a blind woman's house as a helper, she is discovered in the blind neighbor's "talking books," and escapes often out into an outdoors. She dreams, too, what life might have been like if she had been born to her mother's sister Sid, writing letters to her aunt that attempt to gloss over the ugly smallness of her life. You read this book and it was as if she was just rambling on, as she would be talking to herself.

Life with May has settled into a predictable routine, but when Ruth falls in love with a strange troubled stoner whose needy attentions make her feel wanted. You are screaming at the book, No Ruth, no.

Ruth and Ruby get married, but Ruby's lazy and cant get a job because of his earlier escapades in life. Which Ruth always is overlooks and understands his delicacies. They end up living in May's house. May, whose first husband (and only love) was killed in World War II, is jealous of her daughter's small measure of happiness. The tension between Ruth's mother and husband crescendos for a while after the birth of Ruth's son Justy. May loves Justy and takes on Ruby and Ruth in their inability to take care of their son. I felt something was going to happen and I thought that it would involve Ruby but I did not know what. Eventually the fragile balance in the tiny household is shattered by a sudden violence that will scar Ruth as completely as her entire life up to that moment has. You will be shocked and horrified by the trouble she has found.

There is little joy to be found in Honey Creek and Ruths life. Small blessings Ruth can scrounge she holds close to her heart. Her capacity for understanding and seeing is belied by her surface appearance of simpleness; but for all her quiet insight, she is unable to see the disaster headed her way. You are crying out for help to come as you read this book. That this great pain may be the only thing capable of freeing her from the abusive prison of her life is a hard truth that the chance for redemption does not always come cheaply. Ruth's dream of living with Aunt Sid comes true at a great cost.