Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea

When her mother disappears without a trace during a weekend trip, Florine Gilham's idyllic childhood is turned upside-down. Until then, she'd been blissfully insulated by the rhythms of family life in her small coastal Maine town. Her days were spent watching from the granite cliffs for her father's lobster boat to come into port, making bread with her grandmother, and infiltrating the summer tourist camps with her friends. But with her mother gone, the heart falls out of Florine's life and she and her father struggle to manage their loss. Florine will have to find her way to young adulthood -- even as she clings to the hope that her mother will return and her life, as she knew it, will continue.

Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is written in the voice of a feisty young heroine and filled with the dry wit that people on the coast of Maine are famous for. With Fannie Flagg's humor and Elizabeth Strout's sense of place, this debut is an extraordinary snapshot of a bygone America through the eyes of an inspiring girl blazing her own path to womanhood.