Winner of the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel, this exquisite book confronts real-life issues of alienation and violence from which the author creates a stunning testament to the human capacity for mercy, compassion and love. A passionate coming-of-age story of an uneducated small-town girl with far more romance in her soul than she can ever hope to express in her life. "I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it -- to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess. Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place, Ruth grows up in the shadow of her brilliant brother, trying to hold her own in a world of poverty and hard edges. Matt's brain is his ticket out of Honey Creek. Ruth, without options, cleaves instead to her tough, half-crazy mother, May, and eventually to Ruby, the sweet but slightly deranged young man she loves, marries, and supports. When the precarious household erupts in violence, Ruth is the only one who can piece their story together -- and she gets at the truth in a manner at once ferocious, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In this powerful, incandescent novel, Jane Hamilton has worked a miracle: she has given voice to a young woman you have passed on the street a thousand times. Perhaps you have never noticed her, but the next time you see her, you will know who she is.
"An American beauty this book . . . The narrator of Jane Hamilton's sensational first novel is a holy lusty innocent."
βVOGUE
"Ms. Hamilton gives Ruth a humble dignity and allows her hope βbut it's not a heavenly hope. It's a common one, caked with mud and held with gritted teeth. And it's probably the only kind that's worth reading about."
βNEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Hamilton's story builds to a shocking crescendo. Her small-town characters are as appealingly offbeat and brushed with grace as any found in Alice Hoffman's or Anne Tyler's novels."
βGLAMOUR
"Jane Hamilton's novel is authentically Dickensian . . . The real achievement of this first novel is not so much the blackness as the suggestion of resilience. At the end, Ruth begins to put together her shattered body, spirit and life. Her words are awkward, as they have been all along, but suddenly and unexpectedly they shine.
βLOS ANGELES TIMES