RUTH

A woman maintains her independence and questioning spirit while walking the narrow “tightrope of obedience” required by membership in an insular religious sect.

Ruth Della Scholl is born into a Michigan branch of the Brotherhood, a fictional Anabaptist community, in 1963. With a strict, austere communalism, the group eschews materialism and competition and puts its members’ love of God above all else, but Ruth defies any stereotype of a fundamentalist. While other members come and go—including Ruth’s brother, whose disappearance is never discussed by their parents—Ruth tries her best to be a good Brotherhood “sister.” When a friend she’s made at a community college offers to help her escape the Brotherhood, Ruth is shocked. She doesn’t want to leave. Yet she scrutinizes every resentment and frustration she experiences, as well as occasional joy. With humor and barely suppressed passion, she describes her life from infancy through middle age through a very close third-person narrative. The novel is an accumulation of random moments: her distress when her 8th-birthday presents are packed away because she eats a candy bar her mother tells her to put down; the realization that the Bible doesn’t exactly describe the world—“leprosy still existed, pharaohs did not”; the discovery that a boy she secretly loves is marrying someone else. Along the way, Ruth sketches in an abundance of minor characters, too many to keep track of, from a young teenager who had to leave her previous community for “thoughts and deeds of impurity” to an older convert who rejects his former political activism as ego-driven. Ruth’s eventual marriage to an irritating but endearing husband rings all too true. Mothering her three children, especially the unruly son in whom she sees herself, is difficult. The Brotherhood seeps into every corner of her life, and readers will learn a lot about Anabaptist sects. But cheeky, inquisitive, and a delightful pain in the neck, Ruth carries the novel with aplomb.

A charming deep dive into the life and faith of one devout yet contrary everywoman.