| From The Publisher* | Prose with rules of its own captures the joy of friends in harmony, and the special hell of their discord. Rachel is a young single mother living with her son, Tristan, on a lake that borders the unchanneled north - remote, nearly inhospitable. She does what she has to do to keep them alive. But soon, and unexpectedly, Tristan will have to live alone, his youth unprotected and rough, even brutal, mirroring the wild open place that is his only home, and that will be overrun by strangers - strangers inhabiting the lodge that has replaced his home, strangers that make him fight, or talk, or even love, when he doesn't want to. A resonant book of first love, first loss, then second love, Shot-Blue brings to life the dance of consciousness, how in mind and heart we do not exist alone on our own terms. The road was like a portage: an opening that lets you in but makes no promise to bring you out on another side. Maybe the road narrowed to a dead end or was blocked by a swamp raised by a beaver dam. Maybe it led to a place they weren't welcome. She walked through the cut slowly and stopped, her dark hair falling across her shoulders heavily, and Tristan imagined that she meant to let her hair sweep the ground as it did. Most boys would have run out to meet their mothers. But he knew he couldn't understand. She was always telling him, you can't understand everything. ' Shot-Blue is that rarest species, a genuinely wise novel. Its characters are at once too lonely, and insufficiently alone; their landscape feels both tender and indifferent, god-haunted and abandoned. This is a truly exceptional and compelling work, and in that way, its own variety of joy.' - Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances 'Jesse Ruddock understands the weight of things that cannot be said aloud. A sensitive book about lives lived at the edge of society, in the shadow of an idyllic panorama, given voice only in the silence of adolescence.' - Jenny Erpenbeck, author of The End of Days 'Stunning and just so gracefully told. Ruddock's landscape and characters are told by heart and her fierce and beautiful language makes you feel it.' - Naja Marie Aidt, author of Rock, Paper, Scissors |
| Biographical Note | Born in Guelph and based in New York, Jesse Ruddock first left Canada on a hockey scholarship to Harvard. Her writing and photographs have appeared in the NewYorker.com, BOMB Magazine, Music & Literature, and Vice. Shot-Blue is her first novel. |
