When Ruby Tried to Grow Candy

Ruby Louise Hawthorne can’t believe her eyes. Right there, in Miss Wysterious’s garden, teacups are growing on trees, shoes are sprouting like weeds, and eggbeaters are jangling from branches. So maybe Ruby should listen when Miss Wysterious tells her all the important rules of gardening–like watering and weeding and labeling what you plant. That way, when Ruby plants her jellybeans, they really just might grow. . . . Anyone with even the slightest sweet tooth is sure to rejoice along with Ruby when her candy finally sprouts! And it’s all depicted in Fisher’s mixedmedia illustrations that include real 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.)

Valorie Fisher is the creator of many innovative books for children, most recently How High Can a Dinosaur Count?, which Publishers Weekly called an “entertaining book of numbers” in a starred review. Her other books include Nonsense! and Ellsworth’s Extraordinary Electric Ears and Other Amazing Alphabet Anecdotes, deemed “eye-popping” in a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She also provided the photographs for Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little, a middle-grade novel by Peggy Gifford. She lives in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut.