She is enrolled in a private high school, lives in their big mansion, and carpools to school each day with the popular and handsome boy next door.īut Ruby is used to being on her own and is uncomfortable accepting help or getting close to anyone, whether it’s Cora or Jamie or the new kids at her school. Life changes drastically when she moves in with them, since it turns out that Jamie (Cora’s husband) started UMe.com (basically like MySpace) and is fabulously wealthy. She and Cora were very close growing up, but then Cora went off to college and made no effort to stay in touch, not even inviting them to her wedding. Ruby’s older sister, Cora, and her husband take Ruby in, much to Ruby’s displeasure. She manages okay for a while, keeping her mom’s job (delivering lost luggage for airlines) and mostly paying the bills, until the dryer breaks and the landlord comes to check it out and turns her into social services. In fact, she’d been planning to move out as soon as she turned eighteen, so she just figured things have started a little early.

Her mom is a bit of an alcoholic and pretty unpredictable, so Ruby isn’t terribly sad. Lock and Key narrated by Ruby, a seventeen year old girl who has been living with her mom, on the verge of poverty, until she comes home one day from school to find her mom is gone. Because obviously I wanted the book to feel at home. Sarah Dessen is a very popular young adult author and after watching her name and books show up in every possible location (the bookstore! the library! blogs! book lists!) I finally picked Lock and Key up at the library.Īnd then I let it sit on my bedside table for weeks.

Lock and key by sarah dessen