Customer Reviews

Mourning Ruby

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Stories --- embarrassing, tragic or simply amusing --- provide hours of entertainment at reunions and other family gatherings. Although many of us may take our family stories for granted, they often make up a large part of our personal history and our sense of identity. In her new novel, MOURNING RUBY, Helen Dunmore astutely comments on the power of family stories to provide strength, hope and even healing.

Rebecca, the novel's central figure, keenly feels the lack of family stories shaping her own life. Left as a baby in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant, Rebecca has no real family and no family stories. Only as a young adult can Rebecca make a semblance of a family with her friend and roommate, Joe, an up-and-coming historian who creates a home with Rebecca. His love for her remains platonic, though, since Rebecca has adopted him as a brother rather than as a lover.

Rebecca later marries Joe's friend Adam and has a daughter, Ruby. Rebecca's connection to Ruby is even more dramatic than the traditional mother-child bond. At last, in Ruby, Rebecca has a family: "For the first time, I was tied to someone by blood." Rebecca's visceral connection to Ruby makes Ruby's sudden death, described in gut-wrenching detail, even more heartbreaking. I would defy anyone who has a child to read the account of Ruby's death without shedding a tear.

Torn apart by their misery in the wake of Ruby's death, Rebecca and Adam separate, both throwing themselves into their work. In the meantime, Joe is a continent away, fruitlessly trying to conduct historical research while living with a woman he does not love. Rebecca is haunted by dreams of Ruby in life and in death, and Adam, a neonatal specialist, seems to try to reverse the past with each premature baby whose life he saves.

As she tentatively makes her way back to Adam, Rebecca comes to rely on two stories that have parallels to her own. Her employer, the hotelier Mr. Damiano, tells Rebecca about his youth in his family's traveling circus. And, in a gesture that speaks volumes about his love for her, Joe breaks away from history and turns to fiction, composing a novel that imagines both his own absent father's past and the history of Rebecca's unknowable family tree. This "novel within a novel" comes near the end of MOURNING RUBY and helps Rebecca begin the process of healing her broken family ties.

This is a thoughtful, complex novel about the power of story and the importance of family. Readers who enjoy complex novels will enjoy this one, as will readers who relish poetic language. MOURNING RUBY is not an easy novel to read, either emotionally or intellectually, but readers who become absorbed by its web of stories will be richly rewarded.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

Losing a child is like losing yourself-and for a while that is exactly what happens to Rebecca. She started out life as a foundling, left in a shoebox in the alley behind Vittorio's Italian restaurant. Due to the intervention of the Blessed Virgin, according to her rescuer, she is discovered before becoming food for the rats and subsequently adopted. Unfortunately, she never establishes familial ties with her adopted family and, as an adult, struggles to make a place for herself in the world that feels like home.

Rebecca's life is changed for the better when she meets and moves in with Joe. Not her lover, but definitely loved, he changes her life for the good. He even introduces her to her future husband, Adam. Rebecca lives a blissful existence with Joe and Adam and eventually gives birth to beautiful, red-haired, Ruby. For the first time in her life, Rebecca is connected to someone by blood, and she finally begins to feel that she is not alone in the world.

Fate, however, has other plans for Rebecca. Ruby dies. Rebecca and Adam are both lost in grief and end up losing each other. They slog through their days trying to stifle their grief, Adam as a neonatologist, seeking ways he could have saved Ruby in every premature baby he treats, and Rebecca as the steadfast assistant of a wealthy hotelier, Mr. Damiano. Her beneficent boss sees Rebecca's grief and finds a way to help her re-invent her life's story.

Joe, devastated for his friends and trying to deal with the angst of growing up without his own father, makes a tremendous sacrifice for Rebecca by turning away from his all-consuming historical research and crafting a novel set in World War I of two lovers who might have been Rebecca's mother and his father, binding them as siblings as surely as if they had been born that way.

Fiercely emotional, hauntingly sad, and yet joyful in the end, MOURNING RUBY is a story of loss and redemption, grief and grace. Helen Dunmore's skill as a poet has stood her well in creating lyrical, delicate, and passionate prose. It's like watching a ballerina wearing a red or purple tutu-elegant, yet lush. This book is as intelligent as it is bittersweet and destined to become a classic.

Reviewed by Kim Anderson Ray
of The RAWSISTAZ™ Reviewers

Over three decades may have passed, but the pivotal moment in Rebecca's life still haunts her. Her biological mom left her as a newborn in a shoebox in the alley behind Vittori's restaurant. An onion saves her from becoming rat meal. Her adoptive parents had no idea how to cope with a colic baby that did not sleep through the night; over the years they fed and dressed the kid, but were unable to show any love or affection towards the alley brat.

As an adult Rebecca rooms with historian Joe, who treats her like a younger sibling and introduces her to her future husband neonatologist Adam. They have a daughter Ruby, who makes Rebecca feel human for the first time in her life. The next five years are terrific as she and Adam shower Ruby with love. When Ruby dies in a car accident, Rebecca returns to her life of nothingness. Adam leaves her, but she meets Mr. Damiano, who hires her as his assistant while Joe tries to provide her solace with a World War I story about a single mother vowing to raise her child though it means working the brothels at the front.

MOURNING RUBY is a poignant, but melancholy character study. The title protagonist lives an extreme roller coaster life starting with the box, followed by the loveless early years; a fine interlude with a friend and a lover; the crescendo starring Ruby; replaced by deep grief and hiding in a "box"; and finally friends trying to help her move on. Helen Dunmore provides a deep look that human means grieving for loved ones but also those who love you are there for you even when you reject them.

Harriet Klausner

Good book. Well written. This is the second book I've read by this author and I wasn't disappointed.

My impression is that this book wasn't so much about the death of the child as it was the wealth of rich relationships the woman was lucky enough to experience in her life. A nice juxtaposition to the fact that her first relationship in life was probably her most important (between her and her biological mother) and yet it was disappointingly only a few hours long and meaningless.

I was just struck by the fact that despite suffering from the premature loss of her own mother and her daughter, the main character manages to live a rich, full life.

On the one hand, it was very well-written, with fairly smooth transitions between several different formats of the story and various perspectives. And the premise was so hooking, but I guess my main problem was that the book went a direction that I had not expected. I kept thinking that it would be more about Rebecca's childhood, the shoebox... I really expected more closure on that storyline. And I did not think that her relationship with Joe would or Adam would turn out the way that they did. I just wanted something more. Though I did think that the grief, which was the main theme of the entire book, was very well done. I guess I mostly just wanted this to be a different type of book altogether - one that was less about Style and Structure, and more about Story.

Mourning Ruby is more or less about a mother who is grieving the tragic loss of her five-year-old daughter. But the "more or less" part cannot be overlooked. If it weren't for the title and the ominous cover picture featuring a little girl skipping in the leaves in a red dress, the reader would have no idea what this book is about for quite some time. It begins with a prologue that is a dream sequence, told in the first person, of the narrator--Ruby's mother Rebecca--and Ruby walking along a road. I thought that a novel should never open with a dream; it's a cheap technique, too easily and often used. And unfortunately the book continues that way, although a lot of the techniques are more original. After the prologue, Rebecca describes what happened to her when she herself was a baby, which was that her mother left her in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. She was then adopted by parents who seem not to care for her much, and the feelings are mutual. She tells her own story in such a removed and distant way that it is hard to relate to her. Plus, the tone of the writing is confusing and the plot starts jumping all over the place.

Soon we learn that Rebecca lived with a guy who was in love with her, but those feelings weren't mutual. His name is Joe and he writes historical non-fiction. He's in the middle of writing a book about Stalin's second wife, and this story takes up a good chunk of the first part of the book. That story could be rather interesting, but Joe tells it to Rebecca in a series of long drawn-out conversations, in which he makes clear that she is not interested in what he is talking about. So why should the reader be? I never really figured that out, although I did enjoy reading about collectivist Russia.

We also learn that Rebecca has a husband named Adam, but the relationship between them doesn't seem very convincing. He is a doctor who saves newborn babies, ironically. Some things seem like easy plot devices which aren't very realistic-- such as Rebecca working part-time in a bar while her husband is doctoring.

Another central sub-plot in Mourning Ruby is the story of Rebecca and her boss, Mr. Damiano, for whom she goes to work after Ruby's death. To me he was the most interesting character and his story was the most captivating, albeit even more unrealistic than the relationship between Rebecca and Adam. His family performed in circuses in Madrid, and his little sister suffered a tragedy almost as devastating as Ruby's death. Mr. Damiano likes to re-create "dream worlds"--obviously a theme underlying the novel--and bring pleasure to people as his business. He owns a chain of hotels, all named after minor to rather obsure poets: Sidney, Lampedusa, Villon, Langland, Sonescu, Cavafy, Sexton, and Bishop. Poetry and written language play a central part in this novel. In fact, an obvious theme is a writer writing about writing, which I found at times to be both interesting and annoying.

For instance, each chapter--and many of them are very short--starts out with a rather strange title and a snippet of a poem, excerpt from a book, or folk song. I found these snippets to be distracting because I wanted to know where they came from and how they related to the book and what the rest of the snippet was all about. Like much about the book, this information is never revealed to the reader, except at the very end, when Dunmore includes a list of "sources," which include her own poetry. Also in line with the literary theme, Joe tells Rebecca near the beginning of the book that the Russian poet Mandelstam once wrote about baby airplanes as a metapher for writing poetry: one airplane in full flight gives birth to another airplane, which then flies off and gives birth to another airplane. Dunmore weaves this theme into the novel, as a way to show how one story gives life to another, and all stories are connected. I suppose that Rebecca is trying to find her own life story, but the rather interesting plot line about her birth and her upbringing as an adopted child is abandoned rather early on. It's hard to care about a book when each story drops off after it gives birth to the next one. Ruby's death is the only main theme that continues throughout the book, but it's hard to connect to because so many other stories are swarming around it.

Most frustrating of all, for me, wasn't the fact that so many stories were told, but rather it was the way they were told. Much of the prose during Rebecca's narration is beautiful (the jacket cover states that Dunmore is a poet and short story writer, so I might like to check her out in these contexts, in which the language and style might work better for me than it did in a novel). The flowery language, however, seemed to detract from the plot for me and made it hard for me to related to Rebecca as a real character. And some of the stories that had the potential to be the most exciting were told in the dullest manners possible. Mr. Damiano's fascinating life story is told--much like the history of Stalin that Joe is writing--in long strings of conversation, which to me took a lot away from the potential captivating action. I was unsure why Dunmore chose to do this, even though I "got" that she had this over-riding theme of writing about writing, and writing about stories within stories.

Mid-way through Mourning Ruby, the point of view changes, and we are seeing Joe, told from the omniscient perspective, without Rebecca there, and also Adam in the same way. To me this was disappointing and destroyed any integrity the novel was supposed to have. It was another easy way out. The last part of the book is part of a novel that Joe sends to Rebecca, ostensibly to help her figure out her own story. I found part of this plot interesting, as it was about a prostitute named Florence who lived in France during the First World War. The Madame of the house was the only strong female character in the book (I thought it was annoying how Rebecca learned everything about herself through the three main male characters), although Florence, by the end portion of Joe's unfinished work of fiction, was starting to develop into a strong character as well. Joe tells Rebecca that he hasn't finished the book and so he encloses character and plot notes, which we the poor readers are forced to suffer through, right when we were into the story of Florence, and quite awhile after we had totally lost track of the story of Rebecca and Ruby.

Overall, Mourning Ruby was one of the most discombobulated novels I have ever read. At first it left me feeling disoriented, and then, once I got my bearings, it usually left me feeling disappointed. At times the language was captivating, and at other times the plot was too. These times were nearly canceled out, however, by the parts that seemed to be told in a hurry of rushed dialogue. The concept is certainly ambitious and I like some of the ideas behind the novel, but I think they were executed rather poorly, with style valued much more than substance. I did enjoy the writing theme, but it was much too much: definitely overkill. I enjoyed reading about the different places and time periods. Most of the parts featuring Rebecca--all of which are contemporary--are set in Cornwall, and some in London (Dunmore is a British writer). I also enjoyed reading about historical France and historical and modern-day Russia (where Joe briefly resides and where Rebecca and Adam go to visit him in a rather twisted love-triangle). So I can't say I regret reading this unique book, but it certainly wasn't one of my favorites.

For more book reviews and posts of interest to readers and writers, please visit my Blogspot blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words.

I read half of this book, up to where Ruby has a tragic accident. Up to that point, the story is hard to understand with the two entertwined stories... it just left me saying "huh?". I wasn't interested at all in finishing it. ~:-\