Ruby has always been the good girl: quiet, smart, loving to her family. That is, until she meets thrill-seeking and handsome Travis Becker. He makes her do things she would never normally do, like break into someone's house and speed dangerously on his motorcycle. Ruby doesn't like who she's becoming, and in an attempt to distract Ruby from Travis, her mother takes her to a book club. The book club, that Ruby dubbed the Casserole Queens, has just discovered that one of their members is the protagonist in the tragic love story they are reading. The group embarks on a road trip to reunite the two lovers, and along the way Ruby might learn a thing or two about love.This book was so cute. Not exactly the typical romance, because Ruby is trying to get over Travis, while other characters, such as her mother and the book club member, are learning to love again. The whole thing with Travis, though, didn't seem like a big part of the story. Deb Caletti employed the annoying "tell-but-don't-show" tactic regarding Ruby and Travis's relationship. They didn't have enough interaction for me to believe that Ruby loved him. There was a lot of Ruby telling how dangerous he was, and then suddenly she's in love with him, but the reader has only seen him a few times. I feel like the author wanted the reader to be removed from the relationship, so we wouldn't start feeling sympathetic for Travis, but still, he needed more characterization.
Despite this, I loved all the characters in the book club, and how they helped this little old lady reunite with her true love, which was so sweet. I liked how Ruby got to learn about love firsthand, and how Ruby and her mother were similar in their attitudes toward love and relationships, and then got see each other grow and learn about themselves. Even Ruby's dog was funny, making this book a worthy National Book Award Finalist.
8 out of 10.
Frances Robinson has a big secret, one that only a few people know: she's adopted. And that's not the worst part: her birth mother smothered Frances's three younger sisters to death and almost succeeded in killing Frances. Now it's eleven years later, and Frances's mother has been released from prison. Her mother wants to see her only daughter, and Frances is torn between the conflicting emotions of fear and curiosity. When she decides to embark on a journey to seek out her past, Frances receives much more than she bargained for.
Madison MacDonald is like most teenagers -- addicted to Friendverse, a popular social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. She's spent days putting up pictures, writing about herself, and figuring out which friends to put as her Top 8. So when Madison goes to the Galapagos Islands for spring break, she's gets kind of stir crazy not being able to check her profile. But when she gets back, she sees that her profile has been hacked! Unflattering pictures have been posted, and the hacker has said some pretty mean things about her friends and classmates. But the worst thing of all, the hacker broke up with Madison's very cute boyfriend! Madison must figure out who the hacker is and bring him or her to justice. Her social (and love) life depends on it.