Diamond Ruby

Sometimes a reader just finds a great book. When this happens to me, I handle it with care, savour the words, the pages, the chapters. I don't read too quickly, even though I want to know what happens. I hold off that final page as long as I can. Joseph Wallace's Diamond Ruby is such a book. It is the story of a young girl in early 1900's New York City whose life ends as she knows it. No, she doesn't die, but her family is torn to bits with the flu epidemic and a subway disaster.

She is the only one to care for her very young nieces and she is just thirteen. Wallace weaves Ruby's personal coming of age into the growth of the city through the twenties. Organized crime, gangsters, and weak-willed adults are juxtaposed to the better side of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, as well as a blind girl who lost her great diving career along with her sight. Diamond Ruby can pitch like no one else. Her odd arms which have earned her the 'monkey-girl' moniker prove her salvation and that of her nieces.
Apparently Wallace has only written non-fiction before but he writes this story, based on a real person, Jackie Mitchell, like a pro. I was enthralled from the get-go, feeling my eyes stretch wider and wider from the first pages. I especially liked the amazing plot details in the first part of the book. Not for Wallace working towards crisis after crisis until, finally, the climax. He catches the reader immediately through Ruby's 7-year-old point of view of excruciating world events. I will be looking for this author's next fiction book.