Another 4-stars(exceedingly rare in my subjective rating).
This book detailing the struggles and ultimate tragedy of a small-town, working-poor, uneducated family with tons of generational trauma and mental health problems, could be about many things.
Mostly I see it as about poverty. The breaking point, the tragedy, comes from people with trauma brought on by brain chemistry compounded by poverty and lack of resources , forced to live together and work out their traumas in the same small house, always too cold or too hot (poverty), never enough food so that waste is another cause for anger (poverty), staying in the same house because childcare and living expenses can be shared (poverty) without hope of a better situation (poverty).
It's also about hope. Teeny tiny tendrils of hope and resilience that leave the reader cheering Ruth to be a generational cycle breaker.

I stuck with this book and was actually riveted to it at times. Call me whatever you want to call me, but I am literally going to burn this book. I can’t conscientiously pass it on to anyone or recommend it to anyone. It is sacrilegious. It will go into the burn barrel at our ranch. I consider myself an enlightened person, but who needs to read this?

I loved this book! It is written in a very unsophisticated tone, as compared to "A Map of the World." It is a wonderful book about a girl who makes her way in the world, completely unsupported by her family, with the exception of an aunt who lives out of town. The small town in which the main character lives is very nostalgic to many of us who were raised in similar places. The main character grows to become what she hates the most, her mother. The ending is as dramatic as they come, with an episode that no one sees coming!!!

I loved this book until half way when she marries "Lake Man" and I didn't finish. It is so well written, just a glorious way of language, but to me, just depressing. If someone said to pick it up and read the last chapter I would. I did that with "Loving Frank" I am frustrated to give up on a book, but with the pandemic I just couldn't read to the end. Same with the "Boys Don't Cry" movie, from the first chapter you understand that this family isn't middle class, and I resent the "white trash" (racist) remarks as I feel she just wasn't educated. Unlike her brother, Ruth didn't have his ability, may have been autistic, I think that is implied. This is a sad story with redemptive parts about imagination, but for me during pandemic, one I just can't finish. Sorry Oprah, you often pick wonderful classic books but too dark and depressing for me.

Ruth's story is one of small-town isolation and the dysfunction of families stuck together through claustrophobic winters. The main character, abandoned by her father, left behind by her brother when he finds prospects beyond their tiny Illinois farm, is left trapped between her overbearing mother and the drug-addled man she eventually marries. The birth of the narrator's baby boy brings the hope for a new chance for all of them, but the oppressive circumstances they exist in moved inevitably toward tragedy.

The characters in this story are deeply nuanced, and the narrator's voice is powerful through all of her quirkiness. I like the development of multiple layers of complexity in even the minor characters who at first appear very one-dimensional. The author also does a great job of bringing the setting to life.

The climactic scene is extremely violent, much more so than the rest of the story up to that point, although it is certainly foreshadowed. The ending is left very open, and perhaps a bit intentionally unsatisfying, taking the approach that there will never be true closure to the events that have unfolded. Definitely not a happy story, but an engaging one.

Book of Ruth is Jane Hamilton's first novel. Just reading the first lines again grants me the profound pleasure of stumbling on beauty and hard-earned wisdom (about losing one's naivete, or maybe innocence) in the lingua franca of rural Wisconsin.

"What it begins with, I know finally, is the kernel of meanness in people's hearts. I don't know exactly how or why it gets inside us; that's one of the mysteries I haven't solved yet. I always tried to close my eyes and believe that angels, invisible in their gossamer dresses, were keeping their loving vigil. I learned, slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked."

This book was an early Oprah choice, but it stands out from the crowd because of its lyricism and awkward, bawdy truthfulness. It was published in 1988 and was influential in helping to make room for a certain kind of passionate female voice and underprivileged-girl-lost coming-of-age story in the mainstream publishing world. Personally, I have read it so many times I can practically recite parts of it out loud. Great book.

The New York Times Book Review said, "Ms. Hamilton gives Ruth a humble dignity and allows her hope--- but 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."

We were assigned this book as part of a writing course, with the intention that the instructor would have us read a few chapters per week, for us to discuss the author's use of craft. Our first discussion opened with the group unanimously loathing the book so much that it was never brought up again. I read it to the end to see if things got better - they did not, a tedious downer to the final sentence.

Oprah's Book Club! Hemingway award winner! Should be fantastic, right?

Well, it is very well written. Certainly it is a very in depth story of the life of a woman growing up poor in the rural midwest in the 60s and 70s. The characters are very well fleshed out for better and (mostly) worst and the main character does a fine job herself at connecting the dots from one generation to another and seeing how their lives were all intertwined. For that quality of the writing and character development I can rate this highly.

But, my god is this one hell of a depressing tale! You want to like Ruth - to root for her - but at every opportunity to redeem herself or to gain some clarity or to show that is NOT turning into her dreadful mother - she disappoints. Yet the picture you are given into her own mind is one of someone who wants to believe she is smart and wise and has the courage to be someone different. And then she isn't. The tragic ending is quite inevitable. It's only a manner of when and how. Her reaction to it all is again, a huge missed opportunity. In the end I was far more curious how her friend Daisy and her brother Matt's tales continued. I gave up on Ruth entirely and no longer cared.

A haunting, depressing tale of a very troubled family. Even though the plot was disturbing, the characters were well developed and the author is a gifted storyteller. I believe at the end there was some hope and redemption for Ruth (the protagonist). It was a fast read, but not an easy read. The narrative was fascinating, but tragic.

I absolutely loved the story that main character Ruth tells about her pathetic family in rural Illinois, I can't believe this was the author Jane Hamilton's first novel, it's brilliant and made me laugh and gasp in horror too. Ruth's mother May had a hard life - her first husband and love of her life was killed at war, her brilliant son Matt never returned her love, her second husband abandoned her, she's alienated her entire family, and as far as she's concerned her daughter Ruth can't do anything right. Ruth grows up trying and failing to please her mother; and settles on Ruby, the first man to pay her the slightest attention. Ruby, like everybody else in this book, is damaged; also he can't keep a job or his clarity, even after they have their baby Justin. Ruth and Ruby together are completely headed towards catastrophe but she tells the story with such love and conviction it's never difficult to read at any point... eventually it all comes to a shocking head, and then she just continues on telling it until I'm sad the book ends.

The violence that occurs is shocking and disturbing. I don't ever want to read anything like that again.

My copy of "The Book of Ruth" provides no hint on its cover of what the book is about. Well, sometimes life is like that. If you're this novel's plucky narrator, you face the "bristles of everyday life" head-on, come what may, with homespun, exaggerated, amusing-as-hell metaphors among your few weapons. Abide, endure. And crack wise every step of the way.

This 1989 novel, Jane Hamilton's first, is wonderful, a funny tale that also ultimately hits hard and sure does have a knack for getting under your skin, thanks to its narrator.

Simply clever would be a good way to describe this young narrator who's not very sophisticated but whose mind darts to imaginative places. Living in a dead-end small town in a state — Illinois — she'll spend her whole life in, Ruth grows up with few options, marries a troubled man, whom most would consider a real loser, because he's there and wants her, and the couple lives with her mother, chafing, tolerating, fighting, obligatory loving. But, love ... sometimes bad things happen when, as a Sand Rubies song says, love rears its ugly head.

This household becomes four when Ruth has a baby. It's a hardscrabble, isolated life, but it's definitely not all quiet desperation. A pretty friend and a beloved aunt she rarely sees help Ruth cope, and there's love of the sort that isn't really thought about but just sort of is, even when they exasperate each other, which is often. The narrator is not worldly or well educated, but she's not naive. The pointed, amusing zingers keep coming from this unusual mind. Making a novel work this long and well when its very simple voice is everything, is awfully hard to do, but Hamilton — a few instances of Ruth using words that don't seem right for her aside — sure does nail it. That the hits keep coming so consistently is a wonder: A teacher "stepped all over me with her steel-toed eyes." The narrator's aunt has "soft brown eyes almost as tender as a dead mouse's in a trap." Ruth says, "I wonder if she took whiffs of the clothes, if she noticed that they smelled like they were dancing partners with grass and dew and sunshine."

I don't think the narrator's name is ever mentioned until the last ten pages. It's a canny decision by Hamilton. It's when Ruth's name comes up that we finally really know her — it ain't all pretty — and maybe when she knows herself.

One could say that this novel, indeed, takes a long time to be "about" anything. I never minded at any point, and when its young narrator finds her feet — as well as she can — as a wife and mother, it's become about her funny/sad journey; that's quite enough, and I was glad I got to know her as I followed her along.