When Ruby Tried to Grow Candy - Hardcover

Valorie Fisher is the creator of many innovative books for children, most recently How High Can a Dinosaur Count?, which Publishers Weekly called an “entertaining book of numbers” in a starred review. Her other books include Nonsense! and Ellsworth’s Extraordinary Electric Ears and Other Amazing Alphabet Anecdotes, deemed “eye-popping” in a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She also provided the photographs for Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little, a middle-grade novel by Peggy Gifford. She lives in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut.

Kindergarten-Grade 3—Ruby Louise Hawthorn, a prim little girl living on a "perfectly perfect" street, climbs her fence to retrieve an errant ball and meets eccentric Miss Wysterious, who grows teacups, eggbeaters, shoes, and other unusual items in her garden. The woman shows Ruby how to plant candy-actually, she doesn't tell her, she barks, just as she also snarls, grumbles, bellows, snaps, chuckles, and only once in the book, says. At any rate, the candy grows profusely, and Ruby knows "just what to do" with her crop of peppermint blossoms and lollipops. The cartoon illustrations show her changing from a super-neat pony-tailed child wearing a little blue dress with puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar to a normally untidy child in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, tending her garden. Ruby and Miss Wysterious are drawn in what appears to be pen-and-ink with precise outlines and set against a background that is green, almost junglelike, slightly blurry, a mysterious garden where anything could happen. The story is very slight and does not live up to its Mary Poppins-ish promise; children will be delighted with the idea of being able to plant jellybeans and grow a candy crop, but there is no suspense, and it is unlikely that anyone will want to know what happens next.—Marian Drabkin, formerly at Richmond Public Library, CA
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