Love, Ruby Lavender

Though Wiles was born in Alabama, her parents hailed from Mississippi, and she spent many summers there as a girl. During these summers, she interacted with extended family and several other Southern small-town personalities, and “Today she writes about them and they live on in her stories” (“Bio.” Deborah Wiles). She has published 11 books for readers of various ages, including the Aurora County Quartet, four coming-of-age novels set in the American South. Love, Ruby Lavender is the first book in the quartet. It has been nominated for 32 state book awards. Wiles has amassed additional accolades for her entire body of work, including picture books and a new subgenre she calls “documentary novels” about the 1960s.

Wiles enjoys taking risks in her writing, “making up new structures, rebelling against the standard norms, and flexing [her] voice in new ways, all in service of the story [she] want[s] to write” (Leitich Smith, Cynthia. “Career Achievers: Deborah Wiles on Thriving as a Long-Time, Actively Publishing Children’s-YA Author.” Cynsations). Though Love, Ruby Lavender is a work of realistic fiction that does not break the genre’s mold, the novel does demonstrate Wiles’s playful authorial attitude through its combination of