Ruby River
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Lynn Pruett provides, by turns, a sensual, humorous, heart-breaking and uplifting look at life in a small Alabama town." —New Haven Advocate
Hailed as "a triumph" by the Lexington Herald-Leader, Ruby River drops us into a small town during a blistering Alabama summer. Hattie Bohannon has just opened a truck stop—a magnet for transients of questionable background and inclination, some say, and an uneasy presence in tradition-bound, gossipy Maridoches.
Hattie is quietly mourning her recently dead husband and trying to determine the contours of herself alone, but too often her strong-willed daughters—whose burgeoning sexuality is attracting attention from the truck-stop patrons—keep her at loose ends. Then Hattie's oldest daughter, Jessamine, is falsely accused of prostitution, and the reverend conveniently declares war against the immorality of the Bohannons and their establishment.
Lynn Pruett deftly weaves the struggles of Hattie, her daughters, and members of the community into a tapestry of individuals desperately trying to deny the conflicting urges of flesh and spirit, progress and tradition. In the manner of beloved contemporary writers such as Fannie Flagg and Rebecca Wells, Lynn Pruett's glorious tale—rich with the feel and flavor of the South—captures the struggle for the very soul of a community suddenly forced to look at itself in a new light.
"A first novel in the grand tradition of southern women writers." —Planet Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alabama fundamentalists wage a holy war against a local truck stop in Pruett's evocative but flawed debut. Comely widow Hattie Bohannon already has her hands full running her new truck stop, dealing with her four unruly girls and fending off the (partially welcome) advances of Sheriff Paul Dodd. Now she has a new worry: the Church of the Holy Resurrection, led by sex-starved Bible-thumper Rev. Martin Peterson, has exposed her eldest daughter Jessamine's adulterous affair with a church member. To Reverend Peterson and his flock, Jessamine is a "prostitute," and the truck stop is a den of iniquity, better off shut down in favor of a "steakhouse for families administered by Christians." But Hattie is determined to keep her business afloat, even if it means capitulating in personal battles with her daughters and Sheriff Dodd. Pruett vividly captures the sweat-soaked atmosphere of the Bible Belt, but sometimes her language is so larded with imagery that it's incomprehensible ("Jewell... felt a twinge, like a loose tooth hanging by a thread, only it was hanging somewhere in her midsection, close to the ribs"). She switches arbitrarily between first- and third-person chapters; when the characters narrate, they sound unnaturally highbrow ("My virginity vanished quickly, not in a progression of stumbling steps"). It's hard to get a grip on these folk, several of whom, like the Reverend Petersen's coolly elegant, ecstatically pious, Eve-worshipping wife, Stelle, seem a collection of traits that don't quite hang together. Though Pruett constructs the novel as a contest between church and truck stop, she shows so little sympathy for the Reverend and his congregation that the violent, bitter conclusion seems foregone.
