Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Ruby Red

Kerstin Gier

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

Release Date: May 10, 2011

Series or Standalone: Series, Book 1

ISBN: 9780805092523

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 324

Source: Library

Websites:

Ruby Red – Goodreads page

Rating: 4.5 Stars

This book blew me away. I mean, what is there in this book that is not for me to love. It has an amazing story, amazing characters and TIME TRAVEL!!!

Ruby Red was a really new take on time travel. In this book there is no time machine like the TARDIS are mythical powers that allow a person to travel in time. Instead, there are two families who carry a gene for time travel. They are the only two families who carry this gene. The gene carries them back in time and there is no way to prevent it. They do have a machine that works on science that helps to control the time travel. The element of time travel is huge in this book. Gier combines part science and part magic to make her time travel occur and I loved it.

The writing and story-telling in Ruby Red is top quality. The writing was very mature and
descriptive. The writing felt like that of older fairy tales or stories. And then the story-telling was perfect. The plot unfolded at a perfect pace. Once again, this book reminded me of a fairy tale. I felt the writing along with the story makes this book have the potential to be a modern day fairy tale. While it doesn’t have princess or princes, it just has the classical fairy tale feel, or at least for me it did. I do want to say that because this book is translated, I do not know if it has the same feel in German as in English, but the translator did a beautiful job.

The characters in Ruby Red were all really enjoyable. I feel as if each character in this book has a secret that has yet to be revealed to us yet. There are parts of each character that remain a mystery as of yet. The main character Gwyneth was a enjoyable narrator. She was thrust unexpectedly into the role of time-traveler and reacted the way one would if they suddenly traveled in time. I really liked Gwyneth because she felt like an authentic teenager. Then there is Gideon. Gideon to me is still a mystery. He is not your typical swoon worthy hero. At first he is kind of a jerk, but there is still something about him. I feel like we still have much to learn about him and I cannot wait to discover more about who he is.

And now I want to talk about how evil that ending was. The ending was PERFECT in a really evil way. It kind of left the main characters in the middle of a scene but it was a perfect cliffhanger. Now I want to say, if an excerpt for the next book is included in the first book I usually do not read it, but with Ruby Red I HAD TO read that excerpt. I just needed to know what happened next.

Ruby Red is a beautifully crafted story. It spoiled other books for me afterwards. I truly wish I could read German so I could go and buy the next two books in the series and read them now because I do not know how I am going to wait for them to be published in English!