When Ruby Tried to Grow Candy

Publishers Weekly

When Ruby retrieves her ball from an eccentric neighbor's yard, she meets the blustery Miss Wysterious, who barks such expletives as "Jumping jelly beans!" and "Blazing butterscotch!" With Mary Poppins snappishness, the mysterious Wysterious hands Ruby some jelly beans and instructs her to plant them, over the course of some weeks dishing out gardening advice: "Buttons must be picked early, unless you need them the size of frying pans! And remember, with shoes always plant a pair." In fact, a tree in the woman's yard drips with buttons, another with all-left shoes, etc. Even more fantastical than the plot, Fisher's (Ellsworth's Extraordinary Electric Ears) mixed-media art belongs to the love-it-or-hate-it genus. Flat, cut-paper images-of the cartooned characters, highly patterned foliage, trees and more, all rendered in different styles-stand up within intricately composed sets, amid three-dimensional candies, miniature gardening tools and other props. The complexity of each assemblage commands admiration. However, not everything emerges successfully from this mélange: background images blur, sometimes almost past recognition. The alternate universe Ruby discovers is hazily developed also. To Ruby's surprised delight, peppermints and gumdrops blossom forth. What can readers take away? Gather ye peppermint rosebuds? Blossom wherever you're planted? Or, as Miss Wysterious says, "If you're in doubt, nothing will sprout"-in other words, believe and magical things will happen, a nebulous and familiar message that gets a literal interpretation here. Ages 4-8. (Jan.)

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Children's Literature - Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz

Ruby suspects that the mysterious lady next door is "monstrous and mean." So she fears going over the fence to retrieve her lost ball. When she encounters Miss Wysterious, however, she also discovers a strange garden where cups grow on trees. Miss Wysterious, far from frightening, gives Ruby jellybeans with planting instructions. Since she is never allowed candy, Ruby happily nibbles as she plants, and although she thinks they cannot possibly grow, she returns to water and help tend the unusual garden. Her results are both amazing and delicious. The leafy vines of the title page reach around to help frame the text throughout. The two characters are painted crisply and flatly, almost as cartoons. They contrast sharply with the setting of a fuzzy-foliaged garden with collage-like flowers and the odd objects hanging from the trees. The final scenes of the assorted candies in the flowerbeds add to the overall sweetness of the fairy tale. Reviewer: Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3- Ruby Louise Hawthorn, a prim little girl living on a "perfectly perfect" street, climbs her fence to retrieve an errant ball and meets eccentric Miss Wysterious, who grows teacups, eggbeaters, shoes, and other unusual items in her garden. The woman shows Ruby how to plant candy-actually, she doesn't tell her, she barks, just as she also snarls, grumbles, bellows, snaps, chuckles, and only once in the book, says. At any rate, the candy grows profusely, and Ruby knows "just what to do" with her crop of peppermint blossoms and lollipops. The cartoon illustrations show her changing from a super-neat pony-tailed child wearing a little blue dress with puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar to a normally untidy child in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, tending her garden. Ruby and Miss Wysterious are drawn in what appears to be pen-and-ink with precise outlines and set against a background that is green, almost junglelike, slightly blurry, a mysterious garden where anything could happen. The story is very slight and does not live up to its Mary Poppins-ish promise; children will be delighted with the idea of being able to plant jellybeans and grow a candy crop, but there is no suspense, and it is unlikely that anyone will want to know what happens next.-Marian Drabkin, formerly at Richmond Public Library, CA