Mourning Ruby

This book is both one of the best I’ve read in a long time and quite disappointing. The excellent part has to do with Rebecca and Adam’s loss of their daughter—and the author treats the subject with sensitivity and heart-wrenching realism. The disappointing part is that a considerable portion of the......more

This is a rather frustrating book to me. On the one hand, the writing (in the mechanical sense - sentence and imagery, etc.) is lovely and sometimes breathtaking. On the other hand, the actual story is disappointing. I am not one who requires plot-heavy stories to be satisfied with a book, but I do......more

At first I really enjoyed this book. Dunmore's writing style is beautiful. However there just seem to be so many storylines packed into quite a short book and I ended up feeling disappointed by the end as none of them seemed to come to any sort of ending. It felt too fragmented for me and I ended up......more

This book describes the agony of a parent losing a child, of grief and not letting go. In Western cultures, we'd grieve and then tell another person "to get on with it" if the grieving is prolonged. An Asian person would be able to understand how the dead continued to live on. The first section of t......more

I didn't really enjoy this book. The first section was the better bit, although as the mother of children around Ruby's age I found it very hard to read, and I did cry quite a bit. But then it went into Joe's story that he was writing and it lost its way. I'm sure there was supposed to be a connecti......more