Review Ruby Holler By Sharon Creech Essay

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Satisfyingly scary monstersRuby Holler by Sharon Creech 320pp, BloomsburySharon Creech, who won the Newbery Medal (the most important American children’s book award) with Walk Two Moons, is a skilful storyteller, whose books I always read with pleasure. Ruby Holler concerns the adventures of the orphan twins Florida (a girl) and Dallas (a boy), who are named after the tourist pamphlets in the box in which they were abandoned as babies. When the story begins they are 13, and living in the Boxton Creek Home for Children, a miserable orphanage run by the short-tempered and greedy Mr and Mrs Trepid.The twins are each other’s best and only friends, and they have different and complementary characters. Florida is “loud and squirmy, with her mouth full of words bursting out”, and Dallas is “the one more inclined to daydreaming”. They haven’t lived in the Boxton Creek Home all their lives: every so often they’ll be taken in by a cruel or peculiar family – scary, toothless Mr Dreep and his wife with the fidgety fingers, or the self-righteous Cranbeps and their abominable daughter Gigi – each time the placement breaks down, and back the twins go to the sour and neglectful care of the Trepids. So far, so conventional. There is a larger-than-life, brighter-than-natural quality to these people and this setting: we know it’s exaggerated, and we can enjoy the melodrama. We’re not in the realm of subdued and downbeat realism. There’s almost a Lemony Snicketish air: the life of Florida and Dallas has indeed so far been a series of unfortunate events. When a kindly, eccentric old couple turn up and take the twins to live with them in the isolated valley of Ruby Holler, we can guess that Florida and Dallas and Tiller and Sairey will eventually become one family, and it’s not hard to predict that there will be problems to overcome and dangers to face, but that they’ll all live happily ever after. Now, how does a good storyteller make this interesting? Interesting, I mean, to all kinds of readers, whatever their degree of experience and sophistication? First, by a complete certainty of tone. There are no false notes, no striving for effect, no clever jokes that miss half the audience, no patronising facetiousness. Creech takes her material seriously, and presents it without affectation. That happens more rarely than it should; it takes practice to bring it off, as well as talent, but when it does, it means that the tone resonates sympathetically with the subject. The whole book is in tune. Second, by putting the camera in the right place. According to David Mamet, “Where should I put the camera?” is one of the fundamental questions a film director has to ask: I’d say it was the fundamental question of all storytelling. It’s not only what angle you choose to see an event from, but how close you go to it, and how long you spend with it, and when you look away. In Ruby Holler, Creech does an unusual thing for a children’s book: she distributes her attention equally among the adults and the children. She looks at whatever is interesting, whatever moves the story forward, and tells us what she sees, and never tells us more than we need. Sometimes it’s only a glance: some of her chapters are less than a page and a half long. The effect is to give the reader a sense of deep security: we’re confident in the authority of the storyteller. She knows what she’s doing. This is not a great work of literary art; it’s not the best book Creech has written. But it’s a book that shows how very satisfying unobtrusive craftsmanship can be, even working with slight materials, and it’s fun, and it celebrates kindness and decency.Incidentally, if you look for this book, you’ll be lucky to recognise it from the cover. The publishers have printed the title in thin red letters so that it’s almost invisible. Apart from that, Ruby Holler is handsomely designed.· Philip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy