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Title: Ruby River

Author: Lynn Pruett

Narrator: Cynthia Darlow

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-20-12

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 1 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Booklist hails the snappy, smart writing, and memorable characters in this novel that is steeped in Southern sensibility. The last thing widow Hattie Bohannon expects when she opens a truck stop in Alabama is controversy. But thats just what she gets when allegations surface that the parking lot is a haven for prostitution. With the local Bible-thumping minister crusading to close the truck stop, Hattie and her unruly daughters must fight to preserve their names and their way of life.

Members Reviews:

Unforgettable Characters, Sparkling Prose

Wonderful! This is being presented as a "debut novel," but it is supremely accomplished, in both content and style. I read slowly, and put aside as many novels as I finish, maybe more, because sooner or later the author starts slacking off, delivering flat predictable scenes or long stretches of humdrum prose. That never happens here. Lynn Pruett is unfailing good company for 276 pages, and as you make your way through her numerous short chapters, each one offers its own distinct thrill of discovery and insight. The prose is the same way: always graceful, apt, and basically easy, it always has more to offer when you want to pause and savor the full import or the exact tone of what is being said.

Story-wise, what first captures you is the humor of the early chapters, the wonderfully strange mixture of horniness and holiness: that, and of course the human interest of Hattie's quest, as she basically takes on the world in defense of her truck stop and her four girls. Part of what the girls need to be protected from, though, is their own uncontrollable sensuality, with its disastrous tendency to involve them with men twice their age. I don't want to give away too much, but there are enough off-center, ill-advised, oh-no sexual entanglements here to supply a dozen episodes of ER. But whenever you start thinking you have met these people before, on The Jerry Springer Show, you notice again how completely Pruett's writing captures what the tube never can: their humanity, the inner dignity that even the most mistaken and sinning of chracters have in this world.

There are plenty of laughs here, but in the end the story shapes up as a serious quest for redemption, taking us down into the worst places of family hurt and betrayal, then back up again, beautifully, just when we think it can't happen, to forgiveness and reconciliation. Reading for laughs, you end up with much more: a kinder take on the species, and some solid advice on how to turn your life around, should you happen to BE one of those people on The Jerry Springer Show.

A little slice of Alabama truck-stop life

Imagine what would happen if Fannie Flagg (the author of ``Fried Green Tomatoes'') had written one of Faulkner's novels, and you'll get a fair idea of the tone of Lynn Pruett's first novel.

The book crackles with fresh imagery, imaginative dialogue, and characters developed far beyond the usual small-town southern stereotypes.

This is a strongly feminist novel, without a word of visible femonist rhetoric.