On a hot day in August 1995, in a secluded clearing on a mountain in northern Idaho, a little girl died at the hands of her mother as her father stood nearby, completely unaware. The little girl, called May, had an older sister who disappeared that day. June ran from the truck where her sister sat dead in the backseat, while her mother calmly held onto an empty Styrofoam cup and her father reacted in clumsy disbelief. The horrific murder of May Mitchell and the subsequent disappearance of June Mitchell are at the core of IDAHO, a novel that is more about the aftermath than the mystery of what happened that day and why.

IDAHO is the debut novel of Emily Ruskowich, a native of northern Idaho who once found its mountains and forests more sinister than anything else. Her prose is beautiful, creating an easy visual of Mount Iris, where the Mitchells live, and all the varying landscapes in between as the book travels around the state, from the prison where Jenny Mitchell, the girls’ mother, is serving her sentence, to Grangeville where Wade grew up, to the school where a physical June first appears in the story. Told through the perspective of different characters during certain years of their lives, Ruskowich creates layers through time and narrative and the specters of the past.

"To get the most from IDAHO, steer clear of theories about what happened on the mountain that day and try to lose yourself in the descriptions and characters that weave together the complexity of life after tragedy."

Ann Mitchell is Wade’s second wife. She met Wade shortly before the murder and disappearance of his daughters. After Jenny confesses to the murder of May and is sentenced to a lengthy prison term, Wade divorces Jenny and resumes taking piano lessons from Ann, a music and choir teacher at the school June attended before she went missing.

The book opens in 2004, nine years after the events of that day in August. Ann and Wade are married and living on Mount Iris. There, Wade has a large parcel of land and a workshop where he makes custom knives. Ann teaches piano to select adult students from the nearby town of Ponderosa. But their secluded home is filled with unspoken memories, and Wade is filled with a sadness unknowable to Ann. In the house he once shared with his wife and daughters, he is losing his memory to the same diseases that claimed his father and grandfather. Wade doesn’t talk about May, June or Jenny, both because he can’t bring himself to do so and because he’s beginning to forget them completely.

Ann wonders about them, about the life they had on Mount Iris, about what went wrong somewhere within Jenny that day, about what happened to June. She can’t ask Wade, and so she lives with the ghosts on the mountain, cares for her declining husband, and wonders if she could be the reason for May’s death.

In a distant part of the state, Jenny lives in a prison called Sage Hill. She is quiet, keeps to herself, scrubs floors and showers each day without complaint. For her it is recompense. Her cellmate is Elizabeth, who is serving two back-to-back life sentences. The two women have little to do with each other mostly out of their own predilection for solitude in forced togetherness, but after a kindness from Jenny, Elizabeth decides to do something for Jenny to show that they are friends. As time passes, they experience their limited lives side by side and attempt to ease the individual burdens they carry from their pasts and the things they’ve done.

IDAHO is an intriguing and enjoyable read. So often in books and in real life, a horrific event is the focus and the people left in its wake are forgotten as they try to move past it and piece back together what is left of their lives. In my interpretation of this book, that is what Ruskowich is examining rather than the “how” and “why” of the crime. To get the most from IDAHO, steer clear of theories about what happened on the mountain that day and try to lose yourself in the descriptions and characters that weave together the complexity of life after tragedy.