Idaho...
I think book reviews can be both a wonderful thing and a curse for readers. They are essentially opinions, and yes we are entitled to one, but are we really entitled to share these opinions? For most every book, you can find both positive and negative reviews, because just as every book is unique so are its readers. What right do we have to encourage or even discourage someone from reading a certain book? Should we let these opinions out in the world? All these thoughts are running through my head now, because after quick search on Goodreads the first few reviews I ran across for my Idaho choice were negative. I almost didn’t read it. I almost returned it to the library unread. I almost missed out on a wonderful imaginative read. Almost.
I chose instead to think for myself and plunged right in to the novel, Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich. Life on a lonely mountain, one daughter dead, the other lost, and early onset dementia slowly wiping everything away. What really happened on the mountain the day that Wade’s first wife Jenny killed their daughter. Where did their other daughter go? How does the second wife play into this horrible event? We are never really told and the vagueness might leave some readers with no since of closure, but for me the vagueness left it open to so much more. Did Jenny really kill her daughter? Was she covering for someone else, perhaps her husband or her other daughter?
This was not an easy read, nor was it a beginning to end read with the resolution all tied up nicely in a bow in the last chapter. This book was like looking out a window through the eyes of all these different people and each time you look the view changes. No one sees the same thing. All there views combined together give a disjointed view, the rest you have to imagine. And imagine I did. I saw so many possibilities...
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