RUBY PARKER HITS THE SMALL TIME

Thirteen-year-old Ruby Parker wants everything in her life to stay the same. But life refuses to cooperate, giving her gigantic breasts one day and divorcing parents the next. Still, what makes Coleman’s realistic heroine unusual is that she’s actually a famous actress who plays an ordinary girl on TV. Fans write seeking advice from her character, who always seems to know what to do. But Ruby isn’t the girl she plays on television; that girl has a script. As Ruby, a regular girl with genuine problems, struggles to gain control over her unwieldy life at home, in school and on the set, she learns that she too shouldn’t make unfounded assumptions about other people. Although some of the comedy is embarrassing enough to make the reader cringe, Coleman is both witty and insightful, and she makes her points clearly without being didactic. At the end of the tale, Ruby comes to accept the changes that life brings, even deciding to make a few alterations of her own. (Fiction. 12-14)