S. F. Prescott

Haunting and tense!

Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She is the fourth American ever to win the Dublin International Literary Award for her debut novel, IDAHO, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Emily has also won an O. Henry Award, The Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Idaho Book Award. She is a tenured professor at the University of Montana, where she teaches in the MFA program. She lives in the mountains of western Montana with her husband and their three small children. Her second book, NIGHTJAR, is a collection of stories forthcoming from Random House this July.

I really enjoyed this collection of short fiction. Ruskovich explores themes of grief, secrets, lies, and trauma in the most poetic way. It’s always a treat. After reading her debut, Idaho, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy (thank you, Random House!).

Of all the stories included in Nightjar, I found Victor’s Room the most compelling. The build up of tension throughout their time in the new house, and the way the protagonist pieced together her husband’s past was clever and left me waiting for the worst to happen. Ruskovich has a gift for infusing regular people into isolated settings, creating powerful stories about the complexities of human nature. As always, the author’s prose were beautiful and vivid, her characters well-fleshed out. A couple of the stories were paced slower, but overall I loved it! I will read anything Ruskovich writes.

Synopsis:

Five years after moving into the isolated house in rural Oregon where her husband lived as a child, the protagonist of “Victor’s Room” begins to doubt her husband’s account of his family’s past. In “Round Lake,” a young woman’s plans to meet a lover in Tokyo are upended when she learns a startling truth about her mother’s death. In “Owl,” winner of an O. Henry Award, a fur trapper reckons with the dreadful origins of his marriage after his wife is brutally injured by four adolescent boys.