RUBY TUESDAY

Thirteen-year-old Ruby Tuesday has been fascinated by the mysterious world of her parents from an early age. She has been recording her father’s unusual vocabulary—“exactas,” “hedging,” “spreads”—in a discarded library dictionary given to her by her mother, who left the family to follow the rock ’n’ roll circuit. When her father’s friend (and bookie) Larry is found murdered, however, Ruby begins to piece together these puzzles on a road trip she and her mother take to Las Vegas to spend some time with her bourbon-soaked grandmother, who lives in a casino with an iguana named Twenty-One. This first novel is full of amusing detail, snappy dialogue and Technicolor characters, but it is rather less well supplied with discipline. Both the road trip and the return are a little too long, and a little too replete with “significant” conversations. These flaws, however, will not keep readers from identifying with Ruby Tuesday, who in somewhat exaggerated form is going through what all teens do. Her voice is only just wise enough, and her outlook is refreshingly childlike as she struggles to understand her parents and, therefore, herself. (Fiction. 12-15)