From the winner of the Newbery Award for Walk Two Moons comes a novel for young people about finding love -- and a home -- in the most unexpected of places. Filled with humor, poignancy, cookies, and treasure maps, Ruby Holler is about a special place where it's never too late to be loved.

Dallas and Florida have been dubbed the "trouble twins." They have been shuffled between foster families and orphanages all their lives, longing only for a loving place to call home, though mistrustful that one exists for the likes of them.

Tiller and Sairy are an eccentric, older couple whose children are grown and long gone, and they're each restless for one more big adventure while their bodies are still spry enough to paddle a river or climb a mountain.

Ruby Holler is the beautiful, mysterious place that changes all of their lives forever. When Tiller and Sairy invite Dallas and Florida to stay with them and keep them company on their adventures, the magic of the Holler takes over, and the two kids begin to think that maybe, just maybe the old folks aren't so bad....

Filled with humor, poignancy, cookies, and treasure maps, Newbery Medal winner Sharon Creech's Ruby Holler is a delightful book about a special place where it's never too late to be loved.

 

The Silver Bird

Dallas leaned far out of the window, his eyes fixed on a bird flying lazily in the distance. Sun slanted through the clouds above, as if a spotlight were aimed on the bird.

A silver bird, Dallas thought. A magical silver bird.

The bird turned suddenly, veering south over the small town of Boxton, toward the faded yellow building and the window from which Dallas leaned. Dallas stretched his arm out. “Here!” he called. “Over here!”

The bird swooped toward him and then rose up over the building, high, high into the air, over the alley and the train tracks and the dried-up creek. Dallas watched it rise on the air currents over one brown hill and then another, until it disappeared.

He tried to follow it in his mind. He imagined it flying on until it spied a narrow green valley, a scooped-out basin with a creek looping and winding its way through the center. He pictured it swooping down from the sky into this basin in the hills, to this place where cool breezes drifted through the trees, and where the creek was so clear that every stone on its bottom was visible.

Maybe the silver bird had flown home.

“Get out of that window!” a voice shouted from below. “No leaning out of windows!”

Dallas leaned a little farther out and called down to Mr. Trepid. “Did you see that silver bird?”

“Get out of that window, or you're going to join your sister down here pulling weeds,” Mr. Trepid threatened.

Dallas spotted his sister, Florida, inching her way along the sidewalk, wrenching clumps of weeds and grass and dirt from the ground.

“Putrid weeds,” Florida snarled, heaving a clod of dirt over her shoulder.

Dallas watched as the clod landed on Mr. Trepid's back and as the man scuttled over to Florida and whacked her on the head. Dallas wished the silver bird would return and snare Mr. Trepid and carry him high up over the town and then drop him, splat, in the middle...

 

“An altogether engaging outing.”

 

“This poignant story evokes a feeling as welcoming as fresh-baked bread.”

 

Sharon Creech is the Newbery Medal-winning author of Walk Two Moons. Her other novels include The Wanderer, a Newbery Honor Book, Bloomability, Absolutely Normal Chaos, Chasing Redbird, and Pleasing The Ghost. She has also written two picture books, A Fine, Fine School and Fishing In The Air. After spending eighteen years teaching and writing in Europe, Sharon Creech and her husband have returned to the United States to live.

Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech
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