Ruby in the Sky: a modern twist on ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

A REVIEW OF A BOOK FOR TEENS.

Does your teenager like stories with mystery and overcoming hardship? Well then, this is the book for you.

As you read Ruby in the Sky, you will discover you join her in the town she is growing up in. You will stand beside her through the frustrating parts and hold her hand when she is scared. This really is a great book.

I highly recommend you pick this up for your teen, or even as a fun read for yourself.

I did notice, about halfway through it, that Ruby in the Sky is written as a modern twist on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Story Elements that echo To Kill a Mockingbird:

Main Character: Ruby hates school (Scout hates school)
Parent: Widowed Mother (Widower Father)
Crazy Person in Spooky House: Old Woman (Boo Radley), in both books, the parent forbids child to contact them, and the child befriends them anyway.
Court Case: Ruby’s Mom in a case against a boss who hit her (Scout’s Dad in a case to defend Boo), in both stories message is presented through a court case that you should stand up for what is right no matter what.

DESCRIPTION FROM THE PUBLISHER

What lies behind the sun, the moon, and the stars?

Twelve-year-old Ruby Moon Hayes does not want her new classmates to ask about her father. She does not want them to know her mother has been arrested. And she definitely does not want to make any friends. Ruby just wants to stay as silent and invisible as a new moon in the frozen sky. She and her mother won’t be staying long in Vermont anyway, and then things can go back to the way they were before everything went wrong.

But keeping to herself isn’t easy when Ahmad Saleem, a Syrian refugee, decides he’s her new best friend. Or when she meets “the Bird Lady,” a recluse named Abigail who lives in a ramshackle shed near Ruby’s house. Before long Ahmad and Abigail have become Ruby’s friends—and she realizes there is more to their stories than everyone knows.

As ugly rumors begin to swirl around the people Ruby loves, she must make a choice: break her silence, or risk losing everything that’s come to mean so much to her. Ruby in the Sky is a story of the walls we hide behind, and the magic that can happen when we’re brave enough to break free.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from her website)

Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo

Jeanne lives in Ellington, Connecticut with her husband, Paul, her children, Andrew and Sophia and a poorly behaved Golden Retriever named Meadow.

Her middle grade novel, Ruby in the Sky has won the SCBWI Work-in-progress Award in the Middle Grade Category (2016), the PEN-New England, Susan Bloom Discovery Award (2016), the Tassy Walden, New Voices in Children’s Literature Award (2015), and the Ruth Landers Glass Scholarship at the spring NE-SCBWI conference (2016). She is currently working on another middle grade novel, The Prisoner’s Daughter, set in communist Czechoslovakia in 1989.

A breast cancer survivor, Jeanne has been a public defender, taught English at the Gymnazium Parovska in Nitra, Slovakia, worked on Capitol Hill and waited tables at an all-night café/bookstore in Washington, D.C.

She is a member of SCBWI and has attended numerous writing conferences, most notably: Rutgers One-on-one Plus, namelos, Patricia Reilly Giff’s Writing Class, Whispering Pines and the Time to Write Retreat.