Ruby's Spoon

Synopsis: This is the tale of three women - one witch, one mermaid and one missing - and how Ruby was caught up in between. When Isa Fly appears in the doorway of Captin Len's Fried Fish Shop, thirteen-year-old Ruby is entranced. Isa comes from the coast where the air is fresh; unlike Ruby's home in Cradle Cross, its factory furnaces pumping and filthy slits of canal water sending up a stink. Isa is on the hunt for a missing person, and Ruby is eager to help, convinced she will be repaid with an adventure at sea. But some of the townsfolk are instantly suspicious of the outsider with her shock of white hair and glinting mirrored skirts. They have their own lost relatives to mourn, and don't take kindly to Isa's ability to leave their Ruby spellbound. Undaunted, Ruby introduces Isa to Truda Blick, the bluestocking graduate who has just inherited the town's button factory, where carcasses are rendered down and bones turned into buttons. Blickses is on the verge of collapse, and Truda has her work cut out. Ruby is desperate to help Truda and Isa but her alliance with the women is pushing the town to the brink of riot. All the trouble began, it seems, when Isa Fly arrived in Cradle Cross...Only Ruby knows enough to save them all. But first she must save herself.

Review: This is another one that I loved and another promising debut. Thirteen year old Ruby Abel Tailor is a great character, full of spirit and spark. The writing is beautifully imaginative, there's a lot of criticism that the story needs a good edit (I nearly didn't read it because the reviews are fairly bad but the cover sang out to me at the library,) but I soaked it all up and wanted more .. I do love adult fairy tales. Rather like The Girl with Glass Feet this could be a book for older children, there's just one or two phrases/rhymes that push it over into unsuitable. Ruby and some of the townsfolk of Cradle Cross speak in a strong Black Country dialect which can take some getting used to but after a chapter or so I was ok (although I have to say I pitched it more in the West Country which is geographically incorrect but seemed right in my head.)

The book is full of interesting characters, Ruby of course is central to it all, she's a sparky little thing but also a thinker and a worrier. She lives a bit of a stifled life with her Nan Annie who loves her but is afraid of losing her and so attempts to hem her in. For one thing Nan Annie forbids Ruby to go anywhere near water, understandably so as family members have drowned, but it's a tall order in Cradle Cross because the town is surrounded by the cut, a dark, dank, smelly body of water full of rusting iron, bones and cack (Ruby's words.) Ruby is also close to Captin and works in his fried fish shop. Captin is a sort of surrogate father or grandfather rather as Ruby's own dad, Jamie Abel, is still alive. He hasn't lived at home for many moons since he fell out with Nan Annie. He lives, works and sleeps at the Dead Arm, a dock where he mends boats and where Ruby brings his dinner every day. Ruby also helps hand out the tea's at the Ruth and Naomi Thursday club, a club formed just after the war, for women who had lost loved one's .. 'tending and mending their grief where the years had worn it thin.' .. it's not a very exciting life for a thirteen year old.

'Through the folds and entries to the Deadarm Ruby ran, quick as she could without slopping Jamie Abel's dinner out the bowl. She wanted time to call at Isa's, to go over the list of people from the chapel records who they could ask about the Fly's. The sooner they found Moonie's missing daughter, the sooner they could go down to St Shirah.
She skittered down the slope towards the Deadarm. Could hear her father hammering inside the boat, still in it's cradle. He kept a steady rhythm, relentless and unyielding in each strike on iron on nail, and as she set his bowl down on the towpath's edge, something ruptured inside Ruby. Flooded, she was, by a pulsing swell of long-dammed indignation. "What will he do when I have gone?" (She told herself, defiant, that she would not yearn for him. How could she miss her father when she had not so much as touched his hand in seven years?) "What will he do without me? What will he do when I have gone to sea? Who will bring his dinner? Who will come and fetch his empty bowl? Who will bring his tea leaves and his bread? His tooth powder, his soap? A flimsy way of living, this" thought Ruby. Her father, sheltering beneath a workbench on a bed of horn sacks filled with shavings from the oak; his evening lit by paraffin in a black lamp hung high from a nail, and sleeping in a tarry dark, sticky from the years of cooking pitch and bitumen. Seven years, he'd camped here, emptying his cack and p*ss into the Cut, and from the start she'd told herself it was a temporary arrangement: one day he'd come home. How could this be anything but short-lived?
Jamie Abel hammered on. A lurching in her belly, and Ruby saw with piercing clarity, so sharp it snatched her breath that she had shored this up; she had sustained his segregation. With every bowl that she had brought him and every twist of tea, she had lent this arrangement permanence and given her consent. As long as she continued, daily, laying down his dinners, he would never leave the Deadarm. Too easy for him to stay here, and she had made it so.'

Maybe that's why Ruby is so taken with Isa Fly, a mysterious woman with salt white hair, one blind eye and an emerald skirt glinting with mirrors. Isa appears at Captin's fish shop one night searching for a lost relative. She has a way of storytelling which captures Ruby immediately, Ruby is determined to help and in return she hopes that Isa will take her back with her when she returns to Severnsea. For although Ruby has an instilled fear of water she has a longing and a hankering to sail on salty seas and she can smell sea breezes on Isa. In their search the two of them forge an unlikely friendship with Truda Cole Blick, another outsider, who has recently inherited the towns button factory.

To say that the townswomen are suspicious of Isa is an understatement, they believe she is the very Devil incarnate set to bring ruin to Cradle Cross and the local children sing rhymes about her 'Isa Fly has got one eye - Her father pawned the other. And then he cut her heart away, And fed it to her brother.' They believe she has bewitched their dear Ruby, not to mention Captin and Truda. Especially hostile is Belle Severn or to give her her nickname 'The Blackbird'. Belle works the dredger in the cut and seems to be particularly concerned about Isa's presence in Cradle Cross, she makes threats to Ruby, telling her she will drown her if she doesn't tell her what Isa has come there for. The women are not very keen on Truda either who, in order to try and save the factory from closure, has made some pretty unpopular changes. Ruby, acting as errand girl for Truda, finds herself for the first time, criticised and unwelcome amongst the women who have always held her dear. Nobody in Cradle Cross has ever heard of Isa's missing relative and even Isa herself doesn't seem all that intent on continuing the search. Life starts to change for Ruby, everything she has always held dear and true begins to unravel. Things in Cradle Cross become desperate, precious items are stolen and others desecrated, all eyes are turned towards Isa Fly and the Ruth & Naomi's adopt their own methods to try and rid the town of her ... but Ruby is determined to stick by her however dangerous it gets.

An atmospheric other-worldly tale of water and the sea, of witches, mermaids, secrets, grudges, rumours and resentments and of one young girls longing for a different kind of life. It's an unusual book, it's not going to be to everyone's taste (the dialect for one thing.) Slightly similar to The Undrowned Child and I Coriander but more challenging and more original. I love the cover it's really appealing and there's a lovely little hand drawn map of Cradle Cross inside which is so useful when you're just finding your way around. I think I fell under it's spell, I must read it again soon.