


The main character is also a victim of childhood sex trafficking. This novel could easily sit among Lolita and the 120 Days of Sodom on the “will fuck you up mentally” bookshelf.Ĭynthia Bond is a victim of childhood sex trafficking. I have read Marquis de Sade just to see what all the fuss was about and that just felt like shock value stuff. But the scenes in this novel made me more uncomfortable than anything in Lolita. It is a beautiful Southern magical romance novel. I picked it up and thought it was gonna be another one of those Southern magical romance novels. Utterly transfixing, with unforgettable characters, riveting suspense, and breathtaking, luminous prose, Ruby offers an unflinching portrait of man’s dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.This book just sits on the shelves of Barnes and Noble minding its own business.


This wondrous page-turner rushes through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom’s Juke, to Celia Jennings’s kitchen, where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.įull of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark past. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city-the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village-all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. Young Ruby Bell, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,” has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ Uzo Aduba ( Orange Is The New Black)Įphram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. *** SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS’ WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016***
