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Cradle Cross in 1933 is a town in the heart of Black Country, England, still reeling from the fantastic War and dominated by the button factory in terminal decline. Into this exotically grim environment arrives a white-haired young woman from the coast named Isa Fly. Isa is a mysterious and magnetic occurrence who exerts an enchanting pull on everyone she meets. Motherless, thirteen-year-old Ruby Tailor is instantly attracted to her, as is Captin, the proprietor of the neighborhood chip shop, a fifty-year-old bachelor and father figure to Ruby, and Truda Blick, the Oxford-educated spinster who’s inherited the failing button factory. As the reason why for Isa’s sudden appearance become less clear with each passing day, she actually is viewed with increasing suspicion by the tight-knit women of Cradle Cross who come to see her as the reason for the town’s accelerating misfortunes and finally fear her as a witch.
Anna Lawrence Pietroni, in her fiction debut, captures for the first time the dialect of Black Country, and the result is utterly mesmerizing. Cradle Cross is a town out of time—battered by war and yet linked to a distant past, an isolated pocket of the united states whose customs and views have remained intact since medieval times, where talismans protect family members and rituals can help wring away the grief of loss.
Lawrence Pietroni has generated two uniquely alluring characters—Ruby and Isa—and spins a story that feels mythical or folkloric, that is driven by the mystery, throbs with tension, and leads to conflagration. Ruby’s Spoon combines a gritty, hypervivid realism with the dreamlike richness of an fable.
