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Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a sensational 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. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.
Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But soon, Amanda involves note that her old home is not a refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. Using one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly anything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears which is later found drowned under the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the storyline of her family in careful doses, as anxious to cover up from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of this night.
Ruth, haunted by her own memory of this fateful night, matures under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, before heartrending truth is uncovered.
Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novel shows her compassion and a unique knowledge of the American landscape and people who go on it.
