Ruby on the Outside

Title: Ruby on the Outside:

Author: Nora Raleigh Baskin

 

Summary: It's the summer before middle school and 11-year-old Ruby is worried about starting 6th grade. She wants to make a true friend, and when she meets a girl, Margalit Tipps at her apartment complex's pool, she thinks she has found the one. The two become fast friends, but Ruby still can't tell her everything - she can't bring herself to tell anyone her deep secret.

Ruby's mother is in prison. She went to prison when Ruby was just about 5 and Ruby lives with her aunt, Matoo (Ma, too) and she visits her real mother once a week on Saturdays - and she will until she is 31 years old. Ruby has never told anyone this and as she gets closer to Margalit in friendship, she finds it hard not to.

However, just as Ruby gets up the courage to tell her, Ruby realizes that Margalit's family's past seems to cross with Ruby's mother's past.

 

Comments: I think this was a wonderful book. Margalit and Ruby were both very likeable. Poor Ruby had such stress on her at such a young age that the reader can't help but feel sorry for her. The conflicting thoughts going on in her mind about whether or not to truly love her mother or whether or not she wanted to see her seemed very realistic to me.

I thought that Margalit's and Ruby's crossing pasts was just such a huge coincidence.

This book was very light, despite the heavy subjects that were displayed in it. It feels like a less-dramatic and less mature version of the book All the Things You Are. (I have a review for that book on this site - it is very similar to this book in that both mothers are in jail - however, they are both very different too and I recommend both).

I would still rate this as a 10+ just because of the prison themes and the descriptions of how her mother got in prison. There are some mature themes, but they are dealt with in a child-appropriate way, unlike other books (Nest).

 

Complaints: None.

 

Rating: 5 stars!