Ruby in the Sky by Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo

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. Before long Ahmad and Abigail have become Ruby’s friends-and she realizes there is more to their stories than everyone knows.Īs 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. Or when she meets “the Bird Lady,” a recluse named Abigail who lives in a ramshackle shed near Ruby’s house. 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.īut keeping to herself isn’t easy when Ahmad Saleem, a Syrian refugee, decides he’s her new best friend. Ruby just wants to stay as silent and invisible as a new moon in the frozen sky. And she definitely does not want to make any friends. She does not want them to know her mother has been arrested. Ruby in the Sky has won the SCBWI Work-in-progress Award for Middle Grade Fiction (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 annual conference (2016). Twelve-year-old Ruby Moon Hayes does not want her new classmates to ask about her father. A quiet yet powerful story about courage.A Washington Post KidsPost Summer Book Club Read Ferruolo includes many examples of these brave, ordinary people, including Annie, Ruby’s mom’s public defender. The story also skillfully depicts everyday injustices and how those in power control the narrative unless ordinary people stand up against them. The faraway moon serves as a poignant theme throughout the book and connects satisfyingly to Abigail’s backstory.

Ferruolo’s debut has a quietly magical feel, aided by passages describing Ruby’s fascination with the moon. As powerful men intimidate potential witnesses in her mom’s case and seek to push out “vagrants” like Abigail, Ruby must do what she has always feared: speak up. And Ruby befriends a reclusive old woman named Abigail, who is the subject of ugly town gossip. Ahmad, a Syrian refugee in Ruby’s class, keeps being stubbornly nice to her. Ruby plans to stay invisible until she can convince her mom to move back to Washington, D.C., but that doesn’t happen instead, her mom reports the bad behavior of a powerful man (and friend of the mayor) and finds herself on trial for assault.

After the death of her father, Ruby and her mother move from place to place, finally ending up in frigid Vermont. A quiet girl finds her voice and stands up for what is right in this beautiful debut. In Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo's heartfelt middle-grade debut about family, friendship, and finding your own identity, Ruby Moon Hayes learns there's more to a person's story than what other people tell.

Ruby in the Sky by Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo