Plenty of girls have trouble relating to their parents. Few have to turn to a dictionary for help. Ruby Tuesday Sweet keeps a battered webster's by her side -- but when her dad tunes in to eight baseball games at a time on his wall of TVs, his talk of parlays and chalks and spreads keeps Ruby mystified. Then the Dodgers win the World Series, Ruby Tuesday's dad wins a bet, and his bookie is murdered. Ruby finds herself on the run to Las Vegas with her long-lost rock-and-roll mom in a race against the thugs who want Mr. Sweet's winning ticket.

A rare breakthrough novel, Ruby Tuesday is the story of a gambling father, a card-shark grandmother, and a family of women inhabiting a Vegas casino. At the center of it all is the girl who never noticed they were different.

Amazon.com Review
Ruby Tuesday Sweet, 13, was named for the Rolling Stones tune by her rock-and-roll mother and lives happily with her nice dad Hollis. Her brother Jack has just been married in a spectacularly laid-back Laguna wedding on the beach, with the bride in a white lace bikini. In attendance were Ruby’s tottering but tough-talking grandmother Nana Sue and her mostly absent, glamorous, cigar-smoking mom Darlene. Ruby and Hollis are content with their passion for the Dodgers and their ongoing monopoly game, although she does wonder occasionally just what he does for a living with all those TV screens and number charts in his office. Events take a sinister turn when Hollis is accused of the murder of his bookie and Ruby and Darlene must flee to Las Vegas to escape a pair of mobsters. There they are taken in by Nana Sue, who lives permanently at the old Fremont Hotel and is a legend on the casino floor; playing shrewd blackjack, limping between the tables trailed by her pet iguana, and wreaking havoc with her cane when she is displeased. She and Darlene set out with Ruby to get to the bottom of the murder, and with the two hard-boozing, chain-smoking women, the teenager gets an insider tour of the backstage world of rock and the seamy inner workings of high-stakes gambling in Sin City. While the Laguna setting is a bit overblown, the Las Vegas milieu is spot on, and the characters are deliciously bizarre but loveable in this unusual first novel by a young new author. (Ages 12 and up) --Patty Campbell