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Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) Posters
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List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780345439109
ISBN: 0345439104
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: July 31, 2001
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: July 31, 2001
Sales Rank: 8609
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
“POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . [A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST’S CAREER.”
–The New York Times
“[A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . . Schwarz certainly succeeds at keeping the reader engrossed.”
–FRANCINE PROSE
Us Weekly
“DEFT AND ASSURED . . . [WITH] STRONG CHARACTERS AND A PLOT LONG ON TENSION AND SURPRISES.”
–Time
“A strong sense of portent and unusually vivid characters distinguish this mesmerizing first novel about horrifying family secrets and nearly annihilating guilt. Drowning Ruth is a complex and rewarding debut.”
–ANITA SHREVE
Author of The Pilot’s Wife
“RIVETING . . . A VERY SUSPENSEFUL TALE, ONE THAT WILL KEEP READERS UP SHIVERING IN THE NIGHT.”
–USA Today
Amazon.com Review:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2000: For 19th-century novelists--from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert to Henry James--social constraint gave a delicious tension to their plots. Yet now our relaxed morals and social mobility have rendered many of the classics untenable. Why shouldn't Maisie know what she knows? It will all come out in family therapy anyway. The vogue for historical novels depends in part on our pleasure in reentering a world of subtle cues and repressed emotion, a time in which a young woman could destroy her life by saying yes to the wrong man. After all, there was no reliable birth control, no divorce, no chance of an independent life or a scandal-free separation.
Christina Schwarz's suspenseful debut pivots on two of the lost "virtues" of the past: silence and stoicism. Drowning Ruth opens in 1919, on the heels of the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War. Although there were telephones and motor cars and dance halls in the small towns of Wisconsin in those years, the townspeople remained rigid and forbidding. As a young woman, Amanda Starkey, a Lutheran farmer's daughter, had been firmly discouraged from an inappropriate marriage with a neighboring Catholic boy. A few years later, as a nurse in Milwaukee, she is seduced by a dishonorable man. Her shame sends her into a nervous breakdown, and she returns to the family farm. Within a year, though, her beloved sister Mathilde drowns under mysterious circumstances. And when Mathilde's husband, Carl, returns from the war, he finds his small daughter, Ruth, in Amanda's tenacious grip, and she will tell him nothing about the night his wife drowned. Amanda's parents, too, are long gone. "I killed my parents. Had I mentioned that?" muses Amanda. I killed them because I felt a little fatigued and suffered from a slight, persistent cough. Thinking I was overworked and hadn't been getting enough sleep, I went home for a short visit, just a few days to relax in the country while the sweet corn and the raspberries were ripe. From the city I brought fancy ribbon, two boxes of Ambrosia chocolate, and a deadly gift... I gave the influenza to my mother, who gave it to my father, or maybe it was the other way around. Schwarz is a skillful writer, weaving her grim tale across several decades, always returning to the fateful night of Mathilde's death. Drowning Ruth displays her gift for pacing and her harsh insistence on the right ending, rather than the cheery one. --Regina Marler
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Great book! Well written. Good use of details to pull the story along. I completely enjoyed it.
Rating:  -
The book offers some new plot points but they were not fully tied together in way that would be expected in this type of work.
Rating: -
This book is definitely a good book. Reading it will bring great enjoyment. The writing by Schwarz is superb. Other reviews have described her as a "weaver" of this complicated and intriguing plot, and I think that is an apt description. Each story flows, anchors, and yet depends on every other perspective.
The plot was intriguing. Starting on the end of WWI and the influenza outbreak, Schwarz takes us all the way to WWII--a truly fascinating time period done one better by not ... Read More
Rating: -
Drowning Ruth
by Christina Schwarz
Christina Schwarz's wonderfully written first novel "Drowning Ruth" was set in the time frame of WWI to WWII. The main character of the story was inspired by an unfriendly, isolated lady that lived near Christina Schwarz when she was a child. She always wondered how she became the person that she was and what were the circumstances of her life. The following novel is a creation inspired by the mystery of that woman.
It is a mystery ... Read More
Rating: -
I really loved this book. So much that I searched out others by this author, which is a rarity for me. BUT, upon reading other reviews of this book, I did agree with some of them - it was slow in the beginning. But OMG the plot twists!!! You cannot ignore how great that was. Overall, Im reading more by this author!
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