IT RHYMES WITH TRUTH

In Miller’s debut literary novel, a runaway unexpectedly comes to rely on an elderly woman.

The unnamed boy who narrates the novel first encounters Ruth while he’s smashing sunflower seeds with a rock outside her apartment. Ruth is a patient, joke-loving elderly woman who lives in a retirement community. The narrator is a grumpy, unhoused 8-year-old who hates approximately “573” things, including lollipops, home renovation shows, and anything that doesn’t make sense or wastes time. After Ruth slowly gains the boy’s trust by offering him cookies over a few days, the two build up a dialogue over games of hearts and televised baseball (the boy is a devoted collector of baseball cards). When it becomes clear that the boy has nowhere else to go, Ruth invites him to stay on her couch. She has a few ground rules related to the bathroom and the remote control, but Ruth seems especially set on one rule: “Under this roof,” she tells the boy, “there’s no talking about the past. No asking me how I got here. No asking what happened to me the day before we met, or the week before, or a year ago, or 10 years ago, or 70 years ago. That goes for both of us, including you.” The boy agrees, though his residence must remain a secret due to the rules of the retirement community. Life is good for a time; the boy hides under the sink whenever anyone comes over, and Ruth sneaks him food from the cafeteria. She encourages the boy to let his guard down and appreciate the good things in life, though he resists as much as he relents. But after an accident suffered during an impromptu vacation results in a dramatic shift in Ruth’s personality, the boy is forced to adapt—and learn about the interconnectedness of love and loss.

The boy narrates the story from the cusp of his adulthood, referring to Ruth as “you.” He channels his younger worldview as he does: “I tried not to think about cookies. I flipped through the puzzle book to distract myself. I told myself I would never go back to see you. Never ever. Not even for $1,000,000 worth of donuts. I started working on a medium-hard puzzle, messed up right away, and ripped the page out of the book.” The relationship between Ruth and the boy in the first half of the novel is a bit reminiscent of the film Harold and Maude (minus the romantic element); Ruth is a bighearted, language-loving extrovert who delights in nearly everything. Miller’s innovation comes in the book’s second half, when Ruth’s kindness to another boy backfires horribly, forcing the narrator to become her caretaker. From then on, the novel becomes an increasingly heartbreaking story of the boy realizing who Ruth really is to him and what he needs to be to her. Miller’s deeply felt tale illustrates how life’s greatest challenges always arrive before we’re ready for them, and how they shape us into the people we become.

A masterfully controlled tear-jerker of a novel about found family.