Literature -- 4 stars
On her thirteenth birthday, Ruby finds out what she has always suspected: her parents aren't really her parents. Living with an abusive "father," and a too accommodating "mother," is too much for the imaginative Ruby and she escapes into the forest she loves with Shadow--an actual shadow who Ruby has seen and talked to all her life. After her parents find her and bring her back home, it is decided that it would be best for Ruby to be sent away from the forest. Ruby chooses instead to escape again, this time finding a family of three children living in a falling-down house in the woods. The slow reveal of the truth, told through the voices of Ruby, her real mother Anna, and Shadow is weirdly beautiful. There is a real/un-real eerieness to it that reminded me of The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. It's like reading smoke--safe and disturbing and unattainable all at the same time.
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