Amazon.com Review
Ruby Tuesday Sweet, 13, was named for the Rolling Stones tune by her rock-and-roll mother and lives happily with her nice dad Hollis. Her brother Jack has just been married in a spectacularly laid-back Laguna wedding on the beach, with the bride in a white lace bikini. In attendance were Ruby’s tottering but tough-talking grandmother Nana Sue and her mostly absent, glamorous, cigar-smoking mom Darlene. Ruby and Hollis are content with their passion for the Dodgers and their ongoing monopoly game, although she does wonder occasionally just what he does for a living with all those TV screens and number charts in his office. Events take a sinister turn when Hollis is accused of the murder of his bookie and Ruby and Darlene must flee to Las Vegas to escape a pair of mobsters. There they are taken in by Nana Sue, who lives permanently at the old Fremont Hotel and is a legend on the casino floor; playing shrewd blackjack, limping between the tables trailed by her pet iguana, and wreaking havoc with her cane when she is displeased. She and Darlene set out with Ruby to get to the bottom of the murder, and with the two hard-boozing, chain-smoking women, the teenager gets an insider tour of the backstage world of rock and the seamy inner workings of high-stakes gambling in Sin City. While the Laguna setting is a bit overblown, the Las Vegas milieu is spot on, and the characters are deliciously bizarre but loveable in this unusual first novel by a young new author. (Ages 12 and up)
--Patty Campbell
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Grade 8-10–Ruby Tuesday Sweet learns about her quirky family during the fall of 1988 when she is 13. Devotion to the L.A. Dodgers is as close as the Sweets get to a religion. Hollis, her father, takes care of Ruby, since her mother, Darlene, prefers cigars, Johnnie Walker, and the Rolling Stones to the responsibility of parenthood. He accidentally amputates his own finger while listening clandestinely to a Dodgers game during his son's oh-so-California beach wedding. Nana Sue is possibly the most unconventional grandmother to hit the pages of middle-grade fiction. She's a tough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-smoking gambler who lives in Las Vegas with her leashed pet iguana. When Ruby's "Uncle" Larry is found murdered and Hollis is arrested for the crime, Ruby learns that her father's work behind the closed doors of his office full of television sets is illegal. He is a handicapper; Larry was his bookie. Darlene roars into town to take Ruby to her grandmother's in Las Vegas, and the adventure begins. The Sweets are a family who put the "fun" into dysfunctional; not much seems to be off limits to them. The humor is a bit dark and edgy. Kids may be as lost as Ruby with the gambling lingo, but appreciate, as she does, all the baseball talk and history. Amid the murder and mayhem, Ruby is an endearing narrator, more mature than the adults whom she so wryly observes around her.
–Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
