Books like Ruthie Fear: A Novel

The year Ruthie Fear was born, her father shot the last wolf in the Bitterroot Wilderness. For the rest of her short, fierce life, he claimed that this was what had made her so stubborn and wild. Ruthie knew it was simply having to live in a society shaped by men. An entirely new kind of Western, Ruthie Fear captures the destruction and rebirth of the modern American West with warmth, urgency, and grandeur. Maxim Loskutoff brings readers to a small, tight-knit community disintegrating in ways that defy explanation. Ruthie comes of age in a world of indelible characters—white and native, women and men—whose choices bring the valley to the moment of its final reckoning. This first novel from one of this generation’s most “wildly imaginative” (NPR) writers reveals a wild country balanced on a knife’s edge, at war with itself, but still unbearably beautiful and full of love.