Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Review of Ruby by Cynthia Bond - A book I received by enterering to win a First Read from Good Reads - Easily done - Try it out for yourself!

I received an advance copy of Ruby from the First Reads group on Good Reads. This is absolutely the opposite of some of the books I enjooy. It's aobut a man and a women in 1930's Liberty Texas. They are black during a time when being so can cause big problems for a young girl. This book is heavy, disturbing, and gut wrenching. What happened to Ruby during her young life while she was in Liberty and while she was away is really really sad. I had to work to get through this book it wasn't a happy book. I think someone may make a movie of this book, it is a book aobut two people Ruby and Ephraim who has been in love with Ruby since she was a very young girl. She disappeard and was back to her grandfathers home when she was in her 30's. Ephraim had to choose between Ruby and his sister that raised him who is very entrenched int he local church. Ruby is everything they see wrong in a person even though the men of the town made Ruby who she was. This is not a fast or happy read. It deals with a lot of unpleasant subjects and some of them they tell about the girl torn apart by what happens to her but they don't do anaything about it. This just wasn't my favorite type of book. I'm sorry because I always love recieveing new books in the mail. I did donate this book to a small library that my Mom donates time to in Linden Iowa. I'm sure they will welcome the book as they have a very small budget.
Here is hte description as found here on Amazon.:
The epic, unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her—this beautiful and devastating debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, “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. 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. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. 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. 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.

Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. 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. 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