Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

Having recently opened a truck stop, Hattie, a widowed mother of four daughters, finds her family targeted for its role in opening up the community to questionable patrons when one of her daughters is accused of prostitution.

Genres: Fiction

279 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2002

Reviews

[Madison Ertz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Throughly enjoyed— nice switch up from what I usually reach for.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently written

[Jonna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another wonderfully written Southern Gothic novel!

[D. Krauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a soft spot for certain areas of the country: Oklahoma, LA (lower Alabama), south Jersey, the Great White North. That’s because I spent idyllic periods of time in each of them, from the cliched free range childhood of the 1960s in Oklahoma to a Bruce Springsteen-album-of-a-life in a New Jersey high school. The other places have their charms for various other reasons so whenever I run across a book set in one of those places, I grab it up. That’s why I grabbed this one, because it’s Alabama. I’m not quite sure where in Alabama, but sure enough recognizably ‘bama through the quirky characters and endemic redneckery.

Hattie Bohannon, a widower with daddy issues, and her four daughters - also with daddy issues- run a truck stop in a town called Mariodoches. It’s a good place with quirky employees and customers and everyone is fulfilling their Alabama role-playing assignments of being slightly off and what we down there like to call a ‘character.’ Hattie is still trying to get the VA to find and send her husband’s ashes from whatever drawer they have misfiled them after he passed, alone and unvisited, in a Walter Reed hospital bed. See, he was a bit older than Hattie. Quite a bit. Jessamyn, Hattie’s eldest daughter, is having an affair with a married man, sometimes in the storeroom of the truck stop, where she is caught in flagrante delicto by the big-boned cook, Gert (we like to say ‘big boned,’ too). Jessamyn confronts the wife of the man with whom she’s having the affair to demand him. That doesn’t go well. One thing leads to another and, the next thing you know, there are marches protesting the prostitution ongoing at the diner.

How we got from here to there involves my favorite character in the entire book, who is not so much a character as a group: the ladies of the Church of the Holy Resurrection. Led by the good Reverend Martin Peterson, a tongues-speaking evangelical with an increasingly frigid wife, the group links a couple of unconnected events to convince themselves that Hattie’s diner is a den of iniquity and, by the Lord above, are going to do something about it. The ladies and the reverend are the kinds of people who make a crusade out of other’s failings because it’s so much easier than confronting your own. So confront, they do.

Which made me laugh because I experienced confrontation by the ladies of the church in real life. My dad sponsored Friday night dances at an abandoned schoolhouse near where we lived in Alabama in the late 60s. Local redneck bands showed up to do their three-chord renditions of Wipe Out and Louie Louie and everybody, and I mean everybody, for twenty miles around came because there was nothing else to do. It was fun. It was wild. It was rock and roll. The local Baptist church took umbrage and began scheduling mandatory Friday night Bible classes. And that was the end of that.

I should write a book...

There are some MFA-driven annoyances in this book, such as numerous switches of POV and characters and we go back and forth between first and third person with the alacrity of a bluefly finding an open plate of corn fritters. And, other than Hattie’s brother, Troy Clyde, there is nobody here to admire. They’re just regular folk trying to get by in a regular way.

And that’s pretty cool.

[vickieee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seemed anticlimactic

[Stevie Holcomb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow--I'm amazed at the negative reviews of this book. I found it engaging and it kept my interest, something I've had immense trouble with lately. The characters were appropriately flawed yet I cared for them, they were interesting, the story line moved along well, and while it had a much stronger beginning than ending, it held my interest to the very end.

The end was somewhat...not expected...but not in a good way really. I enjoyed the book overall and while I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it (I'll probably forget about it in a year or so), if you have picked this up and are thinking of reading it, I'd say hey! Go ahead! You'll like it.

[Jonna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel kept rolling along like a slow river, and I kept reading, hoping the story would pick up. The plot seemed interesting, the characters nicely formed, but it all just meanders along, never quite getting anywhere. Even when there is a major event, the author tells it so poorly that I was never quite sure what had happened, if anything had! My time would have been been better spent out on the river then on this book.

[Cindy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, holy cow, when I looked up this book to give a review, I saw I had already read it many years ago. I only gave it one star and that’s all I can give it the second time around! I remembered NOTHING about the story from the first time I read it!

[Pam]

08/18/08 rec via bookmooch

[Billie Pritchett]

Will review later