Kate Riley’s ambitious début novel, “Ruth,” opens in 1963, the year that its protagonist, Ruth Scholl, is born into a scrupulously managed Christian commune in Michigan. She grows up with two brothers, a working father, and a homemaker mother, who harbors some irreverent longings for the outside world. (We’re told that she wishes she’d named her daughter “Maybelline Raisinette” instead.) As a child, Ruth is eccentric and absent-minded, and her mother often accuses her of “buddling,” meaning “to waste time on little jobs; to fuss, to fiddle, to sit in a corner skinning twigs with the edge of a spoon...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
