Summer Reads...

Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas- 4 stars ****

This book was quite simply lovely. It tells the stories of both Iris, a very elderly woman living in Cairo, and her granddaughter Ruby, a nineteen year old girl, who runs away to Egypt to escape her nagging mother. The pair don't know each other until Ruby turns up on Iris' doorstep hoping for a place to stay. Despite a frosty reception, eventually their relationship blossoms into something both relateable and heart-warming, as they learn more about each other, and discover just how similar they are.

The book is split into different viewpoints and tenses. There is the present day, which is written in third person and gives a general overview of events that are happening, and follows Ruby's exploits away from Iris. It also gives more insight into Ruby's mother and Iris' daughter Lesley, as she worries about her daughter back home in England before eventually visiting Cairo herself. Then there is Iris' point of view, which is delivered in first person, and skips between the present day, and the past, back when Iris was living in Egypt during the second world war.

She recounts meeting the love of her life, and both the highs and lows of living through a world war far away from home, which she recalls in the following quote:

'Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother's French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.

It was dreams, mostly.'

One of the most heart-wrenching things about the book is that back in the present, it shows an old woman coming to terms with the fact that her very existence is decaying. This was shown most poignantly in the quote:

'Memory is not a recipe or shopping list. Memory is the scent of clear water at an oasis, the brush of lips on naked skin, a plangent chord. I cannot capture these things and dictate them to another person. I am a doctor, not a poet. There is nothing I can say.'

It also tells how Ruby learns to come to terms with the traumatic events in her past, with the help of a local boy of a similar age, Ash. The meeting of the two youngsters shows a culture clash, and forces Ruby to take a closer look at both herself, and the tumultuous relationship she has with her mother.

I would recommend this to someone who is searching for a meaningful book, that doesn't rely on shock or dramatic action to grasp hold of the reader's attention. It is both wonderfully happy and tragically sad, and for that I think Rosie Thomas should be highly commended.