By Nora Raleigh Baskin
Ruby is eleven and starting middle school, and no one but her aunt knows her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five.
Ruby Danes has kept the same secret since she was five: her mother is in prison, sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years, and Ruby lives with her aunt. She has gotten good at hiding it. Then Margalit moves into the condo complex and becomes the closest friend Ruby has ever had, and the secret starts to weigh more, because a friendship only goes so far when you're keeping something that big out of it. Ruby is almost ready to tell her, and then she learns that Margalit had a brother who died years ago, with the same first name, in the same town, as the teenage boy killed in her mother's case. So Ruby starts trying to find out exactly what her mother did, and every fact she turns up could cost her the one person she wants to tell.
Ruby isn't sad in one straightforward way. She loves her mother and is furious at her, ashamed, ashamed of being ashamed, and worn out from tracking who knows what, and Baskin lets all of that be true at the same time without nudging Ruby toward feeling better about it. She also refuses the easy version: Ruby's mother is drawn with real love and is also responsible for where she is, and the book never asks Ruby to choose between those. For a child who has already started deciding who gets told about their own family, some of what Ruby does day to day may look familiar, and the book treats that weighing as real rather than as something the child invented.