Excerpt from Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She laid her Almanac—she liked the way that sounded—on her lap, shook out the sheet of newspaper and held it up so it would catch the light. She read the headlines and no more (“Miss Brenda Paul to go to Prison,” “Criminal Libel: Verdict in Mr. X Case,” “New Orchid Named ‘Lady Mayoress’?”) until she came to one that caught her: “Sleepwalker’s Fall into the Sea.” Ruby read enough to be sure this was what she wanted (“they traced the wet footprints to the forecastle, where they found a heap of wet clothes and Alexander Middleton, a young deckhand, lying naked in his bunk.”), and with a pair of trimming scissors from her pinny she clipped the two-inch square of story out and slipped it in between the pages of her Almanac for pasting later. Nothing on the breeze to show this night was different. Not quite yet.

She had put her book safely away and crumpled up the paper for the fire—the kettle singing, now, and Captin wanting tea—when she heard dislocated voices on the Cut, resounding hard and clear, and then she saw the swinging light approaching around the kink as it curved behind Blickses. She stood up quickly and stepped back inside the doorway, leaning out and peering at the lurching lamp, but holding to the frame. Boats, Ruby loved. It was the water that they traveled on that troubled her. Each time a boat passed by she’d fix herself to something firm on land because she would be, suddenly, afraid that if she moved from where she stood she might step out towards the water. So as the light swayed side to side along the Cut, Ruby set her back against the frame and pressed her feet hard down against the stone. It looked to Ruby like a common barge—room for the payload, with a little one-man cabin at the back. But this boat didn’t pass. It veered in to take a mooring behind Ferret. And on the platform up next to the skipper stood a slighter figure with an arm out on the bar for holding steady.

The bow light glinted on a woman’s face and fierce white hair that gleamed, half coiled, inside the lowered hood of a deep crimson cloak. Ruby drew back further as the woman disembarked and stumbled on the towpath. She found her footing; glanced up and caught Ruby’s eye. As she did so something started deep in Ruby, and for a moment Ruby felt she was about to spew up all the life she knew. Her eyes grew wide. She darted back inside and closed the door and shrank down below its window to wait for the woman to pass by.

“Is my tea ever coming?” Ruby flinched at Captin’s voice behind her. “What yo up to, Rubygirl? Boiled to dry, that kettle has, all but.” He took up the thick cloth by the grate and lifted off the kettle, shaking it to see that there was water still inside. “Just enough,” he said, but seeing Ruby was still crouching by the door, he set the kettle, clank, down on the hotplate and crouched beside her, pressing the warm flat of his hand to her forehead. “Am yo all right, our Ruby?”

“There’s someone out there.” She tried to tug him, keep him down, voice low—too low for Captin.

“Is it them kids again? Better not be messing with my Ferret, they had better not.”

Before Ruby could pull him back, he’d raised himself up, yanked open the door and thrown his chest out and his hands wide like a bear ready to growl and roar at felons. Ruby could not stop him, and that’s how Isa Fly got in.

In the days and weeks that followed, Ruby tried to work out when she’d found the breach in her own history (the breach that’s stitched in every story: run your fingers over it and you will find a clumsy nub where someone tried to darn across the slit). Ruby could not stop him. Captin, tamed and gallant and seeming younger than his fifty years, asked the woman in. And looking back, Ruby knew this was when it started; the slow unraveling of all that she had held as sure and true.

Excerpted from Ruby's Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni Copyright © 2010 by Anna Lawrence Pietroni. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.