THE RUBY SLIPPERS.

THE RUBY SLIPPERS by KEIR ALEXANDER.

SOURCE: A Reader's Group Read.

BACK COVER BLURB: Old Rosa the bag lady shuffles along the streets of New York, stinking, silent and shunned.

After she suffers a terrible accident, her nephew Michael is called upon to visit her squalid apartment and from in amongst her reeking piles of junk, he unearths something that hints at a Rosa he can barely imagine: an original pair of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.

The slippers soon become an irresistible beacon to the misplaced hopes and darkest desires of friends, family and foe. But who will stop to learn the remarkable story behind Rosa's 'Ruby Millions'?

FIRST SENTENCE {Chapter One}: She stinks.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 185}: 'Ah well .....' he says finally, and seeing no sign of anything in the petrified face, raises his hand, gives a little wiggle of his fingers, as if saying goodbye to a child, and walks away, leaving the emptiness of her there upon the bed.

MY THOUGHTS: A book I don't particularly want to review. A book I'd much prefer to give you a copy of so that you too could discover the literary gem that is The Ruby Slippers. 

Our October 2014 Reader's Group read, of all of the many books we have read this is only the third one that I've wanted a copy of for our shelves.

With a big (and I mean that in every sense of the word) cast of seemingly random characters who each have their own part to play in this debut novel,
the story traverses between Latvia at the start of WWII to present day America. Not always a feat an author manages to pull off without losing the reader but Keir Alexander does so with much aplomb. Rosa's tale from a free-spirited young woman, dresser to Miss Judy Garland, possessor of THE ruby slippers to 'stinking bag lady' (largely revealed to us bit by bit through notes she kept) though not perhaps as prominent as it might have been the linchpin on which the whole book hinges.

Full of pathos and yet also moments of unbridled happiness. A modern parable that proves there really is no place like home, this has to be one of, if not my favourite read of the year so far.