Love, Ruby Lavender

By Deborah Wiles

Hi! This book was amazing! My favorite character was Dove, one of Ruby’s friends. She liked to record how people acted so that she could guess why they did certain things. I’ve always wondered what people were thinking, myself.

Ruby is a fun girl who has a way of making everything seem crazy. When her grandpa died, it was a sad time. The police thought that he had just fallen asleep when he was driving, but Ruby knew there was more to the story. Ruby was convinced that it was her fault that her grandfather died. He was driving with a friend to stay in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was supposed to stay overnight, but Ruby convinced him to come back later that night. When her grandpa was driving, he fell asleep and drove them off a bridge. Melba Jane was the friend’s daughter. She had a different way of handling it. Melba Jane (who was about Ruby’s age) teased Ruby all the time because of it.

Years later, two very serious accidents happened. Melba Jane was auditioning for a part in the Operetta, when Ruby’s chicken interrupted her part. It knocked a can of paint down over Melba’s head, and they had to cut off all of Melba’s hair, and Melba was convinced that Ruby did it on purpose. Because of this incident, Melba Jane snuck over to Ruby’s greenhouse that night. She threw rocks through the windows where Ruby was sleeping with her baby chick eggs, with Dove, and with her plants. The rocks hit two eggs with baby chicks inside them. The chicks were killed, but one other chick survived.

How will Ruby and Melba Jane make up? Are they going to continue on in a raging war? Or will they eventually apologize? As I always say, read the book to find out!

A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:

“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor – zero being not scary at all and five being majorly scary): 2