[Hungry Hills] tells of the efforts of the young Snit Mandolin to find his roots and re-establish a home in the barren farmlands of northern Alberta, to which he returns after an absence of several years. The period covered is one hot, dry summer during which the protagonist discovers his incestuous origins and learns a kind of stoical integrity from his aunt, the one figure who seems to have survived the tortures of life in the hills with any dignity…. [The] novel shows Ryga's interest in the lives of the poor and oppressed as well as his preoccupation with problems of structure. One of the interesting features of Ryga's development as a writer has been his search for a form that would give him the flexibility he needs as an artist. His progress after the comparatively traditional realism of Indian and Hungry Hills has been in the direction of freer and freer forms—forms that in such later plays as Sunrise on Sarah and Paracelsus dispense almost altogether with conventional plot. The free-form structure of the plays (and of his second novel Ballad of a Stonepicker) allows Ryga to indulge to the full his tendency to alternate between the accurately delineated particular and the cloudy generalization which is a notable characteristic of his writing (and, some would say, his fatal weakness.)

On the face of it, Hungry Hills is a typical regional naturalistic novel with the strong emphasis on perversion and violence characteristic of the type. Certain parts of the novel also suggest a heavily didactic purpose (which may account for the work's "acclaim in the Soviet Union"). (p. 185)

One possible reading of the novel, then, is as a socialist tract in which Snit Mandolin is educated in the realities of economic oppression and the need for social action. (p. 186)

But there is much in the novel to discourage the kind of pious optimism implicit in such a reading. Ryga's vision of the hills is bleak, and his attitude towards social protest and grass roots political action is curiously ambivalent. Life in these hungry hills is no romantic idyll; it is nasty, poor, brutish and short. To survive in such an environment seems to require the inarticulate endurance of Aunt Matilda, the despairing superstition of Shnitka, or the ruthless outlawry of Johnny Swift. Snit's failure to change the society of the hills is bound up with his failure to find the home that he sought. For Snit remains alienated until the end. He rejects the criminal alternative and is reconciled with his indomitable aunt. But part of the wisdom he learns from the old woman is that one cannot find meaning for one's life in such traditional shibboleths as love or responsibility…. It is Ryga's refusal to present pat answers to the problems he raises that sets him above the kind of novelist that is suggested by the description of Hungry Hills on the cover of the recent edition as a "tragedy of depopulation of the rural countryside." What impresses in his work is not his social criticism, still less his portrayal of the agents of justice and bureaucracy, but his assertion of individual courage and dignity in the face of those most terrible oppressions—loneliness and death. (pp. 186-87)