Ruby

Megan Harlan

[R]ich and surprising emotional depths. —The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Packed with convincing detail and effortless description, Hood's tale of romance and loss mixes the venerable with the vulgar and brings the adult world into vibrant contact with adolescence. Thirty-seven-year-old Lower East Side milliner Olivia meets and marries the love of her life only to lose him, less than a year later, to a reckless teenager speeding around a blind corner. Weakened by grief and unable to make peace with her husband's killer, Olivia retreats to the couple's summer house, which is soon invaded by another teenager, this time a trespasser: the manipulative, precocious and pregnant title character. The relationship that develops between the two women--first wary, then needy, finally loving--is the substance of this rich and well-imagined story. With equal ease, Hood (The Properties of Water) describes Olivia dancing alone to a Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald duet in her St. Mark's Place hat shop, and Ruby, a smart, poor kid from Rhode Island who covets the sophistication and luxury she sees around her. Though Ruby sometimes seems older than her age, she is every inch a 15-year-old when she worries that her swelled stomach makes her look like John Candy and claims that she's had a sordid affair with her stylish French teacher. Hood writes with authority and humor, blending the moneyed scenery of great New England fiction with the sweet audacity of a paperback barn burner. Along the way, her observations about widows and divorcé es, gestation and childbearing, fashion magazines and overcooked risotto make for disarming and ultimately affecting entertainment.

Library Journal

In the year since her husband David was hit by a car and killed while jogging at their Rhode Island summer place, Olivia hasn't come to terms with his senseless death. She's the "consumed by grief" poster child, disturbed that he'd gone jogging when she'd turned away from lovemaking that fateful morning. She's about to sell the summer house when Ruby, a pregnant, 15-year-old runaway, arrives on her doorstep. The teen's a hard case: sullen, deceptive, manipulative, pot-smoking, and a thief. But she's carrying what Olivia wants, the baby she and David never got around to making. Hood's deft characterizations and insight into tangled motivations make for brisk, realistic storytelling. She's Barbara Kinsolver without the whimsy. Olivia and Ruby, both troubled souls, aren't easy to like, and the ending's fittingly anticlimactic. The author of five previous, critically acclaimed novels. -- Jo Manning, formerly Reader's Digest Lib., Miami Beach

Library Journal

In the year since her husband David was hit by a car and killed while jogging at their Rhode Island summer place, Olivia hasn't come to terms with his senseless death. She's the "consumed by grief" poster child, disturbed that he'd gone jogging when she'd turned away from lovemaking that fateful morning. She's about to sell the summer house when Ruby, a pregnant, 15-year-old runaway, arrives on her doorstep. The teen's a hard case: sullen, deceptive, manipulative, pot-smoking, and a thief. But she's carrying what Olivia wants, the baby she and David never got around to making. Hood's deft characterizations and insight into tangled motivations make for brisk, realistic storytelling. She's Barbara Kinsolver without the whimsy. Olivia and Ruby, both troubled souls, aren't easy to like, and the ending's fittingly anticlimactic. The author of five previous, critically acclaimed novels. -- Jo Manning, formerly Reader's Digest Lib., Miami Beach

Megan Harlan

[R]ich and surprising emotional depths. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A widow and a teenager form a friendship that helps both move ahead with their lives. Livia meets David when he walks into her East Village hat shop as she's dancing alone to the strains of "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Four months later, the newlyweds marry at City Hall, accompanied by Olivia's cat Arthur dressed in a custom-made top hat. They settle into cozy domesticity, buying a beach house in Rhode Island, painting each other's toenails, reveling in their shared love for Stickley chairs, Leonard Cohen songs, and Disneyland ("but not Disney World"). The extreme preciosity of this version of marital bliss makes it hard to share Olivia's devastation when, a scant year later, David is hit by a car while jogging, especially since Hood's depiction of mourning is as schematic as her characterizations. The story picks up, however, when Olivia discovers 15-year-old Ruby sitting in the kitchen of the beach house. Pregnant and unmarried, Ruby has been thrown out by her working-class mother; her college-student boyfriend seems unlikely to provide much support, either. Olivia decides that adopting Ruby's baby will give her a reason to go on living, and Ruby agrees to the plan, though it's clear that this believably flaky teenager can't be relied on to stick to any decision. Hood makes nice use of physical detail to show Olivia slowly regaining her appetite for life, due less to impending motherhood than to her growing fondness for Ruby, who also gains a new sense of the possibilities open to her from observing Olivia's more privileged existence. The story's unexpectedly touching denouement commendably resists the temptation to provide easy, feel-good resolutions. Not the most profoundexploration of grief and loss, but once past the cutesy set-up, veteran Hood (Places To Stay the Night) provides a solid tale and several genuinely affecting moments.