Title: Ruby Author: Cynthia Bond
Published: April 29, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 330
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads: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.
I’ve thought for several weeks about what I wanted to say about Ruby. I’m generally not an emotionally engaged reader, and when I review books I rarely mention my feelings. But with this book, it’s impossible to do otherwise. Cynthia Bond’s debut is heartbreaking and destroying and brutal. It’s not a nice book, but it is one that challenges perspectives and thought processes in truly important ways.
In this book, Bond focuses on a Southern community and explores its dynamics and asks questions. Ruby asks how a group of people can turn a blind eye to systematic sex abuse, asks how people become abusers, and how a woman can come back to herself after the brutality she’s endured. The stories Ruby has to tell are horrific and almost unbearable for the reader—one can only imagine what they were like for Ruby herself. But as one character tells her, “If you can bear to have lived it, then I can bear to listen”.
And why shouldn’t we listen, as readers, if these events reflect reality and occur in the very world we live in? Don’t we owe victims that recognition?
But beyond telling the story of near-unimaginable horrors, Ruby is also a story of recovery and restoration. With a hint of magical realism, Bond highlights the struggle between the spirits and history that linger over Ruby and Ruby herself. Elements of Christianity and Voodoo come into play, and Ephram, a middle-aged man who’s been in love with Ruby since childhood, adds his strength to hers, though in the end it’s Ruby herself who stands alone against the cruelty she has suffered, and only by herself can she achieve victory over her past.
In the end, Ruby offers its readers hope, a chance for beginnings and futures that are not darkened with what came before. As I said, Cynthia Bond does not try to make this a nice book, and even if the end seems brighter, it doesn’t discount what has happened in this woman’s life to make the recovery necessary. Ruby is a tough, unflinchingly gruesome book, but it’s a good one. An important one. This was a novel that left me raw and aching, hurt me in an intense, personal way I’m not used to experiencing.
