Description
In Their Ruin by Joyce Goldenstern
ISBN: 9781936364442
Price: $17.99
205 pages
In Their Ruin opens in the colorful, parochial Chicago suburb of Cicero, beginning in the late 1940’s when the remnants of the gang once led by Al Capone still existed and ethnic prejudices colored people’s opinions. Chester, the Stone family’s troubled father, is a bookie as well as a mathematical savant, and his brother is a hitman. Gladys, the mother, is from South Dakota and her family is equally influential in the development of the three children–brothers– teaching them folk tales and family legends and how to hunt and fish during long summer vacations. As time passes, street gangs exert their power over the brothers’ activities, and Gladys worries about her sons’ safety as well as her husband’s deteriorating mental health and the family’s growing financial instability. It all becomes too much for her and ultimately the brothers are left to raise themselves in both conventional and unconventional ways. Their diverging paths and lingering psychic wounds lead to mutual estrangement, setting each brother on an individual journey to redemption. This novel does a brilliant job of presenting Chicago’s working class as it was 75 years ago and as it has changed.
Reviews
“The narratives of In Their Ruin interlock to expose readers to the deep emotional wounds of three brothers, Hank, Samuel, and Felix. Joyce Goldenstern deftly sets into motion a tale of abandonment and mental illness through the voices of her characters, revealing layers of hope, loneliness, and entrapment. The denouement does not disappoint—read this book!”
— Erin O’Neill Armendarez , editor-in-chief of Aji Magazine
“The three Stone brothers of Joyce Goldenstern’s incisive, absorbing family novel, In Their Ruin, are “boys of light and shadow,” as well as the most finely drawn characters I’ve encountered in fiction in some time. Among the book’s many riches—the brothers’ errant parents and complicated wives and lovers, and their surprising turns in personal and social fortunes—is Goldenstern’s deep understanding of the novel’s environment: Cicero, Illinois, and nearby Chicago. In the traditions of Nelson Algren and Stuart Dybek, Goldenstern places the Stones’ struggles in a setting where ‘the sacred and the profane seemed of a piece.’”
— Judy Doenges, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World and What She Left Me (winner of Bakeless Fiction Prize)
“In Their Ruin is about what family members do to one another—about how they start out well, perhaps, with hope, perhaps, but can become calamities for everyone involved. It’s also about guilt, duty, responsibility. And chance and reaching out. This novel says so much about families and destiny vs. nature vs. nurture.”
— S. L. Wisenberg, author of The Sweetheart Is In and The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home (2023 winner of the Juniper Prize)
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