Blood Sugar by Sascha Rothchild
Published by Trapeze
Publication Date: 19th April 2022
Book Description:
When Ruby was a child growing up in Miami, she saw a boy from her school struggling against the ocean waves while his parents were preoccupied. Instead of helping him, Ruby dove under the water and held his ankle down until he drowned. She waited to feel guilty for it, but she never did.
And, as Ruby will argue in her senior thesis while studying psychology at Yale, guilt is sort of like eating ice cream while on a diet - if you're already feeling bad, why not eat the whole carton? And so, the bodies start to stack up.
Twenty-five years later, Ruby's in an interrogation room under suspicion of murder, being shown four photographs. Each is a person she once knew, now deceased. The line-up includes her husband Jason. She is responsible for three of the four deaths... but it might be the crime that she didn't commit that will finally ensnare her.
My Thoughts:
The opening scenes of this book set the general tone of Ruby Simon's life: if you want to put a situation right, you have to take every opportunity, even if it means taking a life. As long as Ruby can justify why she's done it, then in her mind she's done the world a favour. And if you get away with it, then that's a bonus!
One person who questions Ruby's reasoning is Miami Beach Detective Keith Jackson. Twenty-five years on from Ruby's first venture into murdering people, she finds herself sitting in an interview room opposite the detective being shown photographs which are unnervingly significant to Ruby: the three people whose lives she has taken. But as far as Ruby is aware, she's the only one who knows the truth. So how come the detective has these jigsaw pieces which, if he can put them together to form a convincing picture, could put Ruby in jail for a very long time?
This book is not fast-paced; it's a simmering potion of a story which has the potential to explode at any point. The story flicks between Ruby's early years and the current predicament she finds herself in. If the detective was in possession of the facts that Ruby relays to the reader then she would be in serious trouble. That said, you can't help but find yourself liking Ruby despite the fact that she's a serial unaliver. The sense of injustice when the detective turns over a fourth photograph had me wanting to shout out in Ruby's defence. No way would Ruby have been responsible for her husband's death - so who could possibly have made such an accusation? Or is she a totally unreliable narrator who had me fooled for the entire book?
I enjoyed this book overall, and would have loved to have been able to immerse myself in it in one sitting, but sadly the day job put paid to that. I found my mind wandering back to the book in quieter moments of my day, making contrasts between what Ruby was telling us and the "facts" as Detective Jackson presented them. Which version was the truth? The message I took from this book is that there will always be that one person who wants to bring you down in life, but if you choose your allies wisely in life and look out for them, then maybe, just maybe, they will be prepared to do the same for you.
A strong 4 star rating from me.
About the Author:
Sascha Rothchild grew up in Miami Beach. She majored in playwriting at Boston College. She moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. After many odd jobs and first drafts, she broke into the tv and film business when her humorous personal essays published in LA Weekly got the attention of studios. She then wrote her comedic yet heartfelt memoir, How To Get Divorced By 30, published by Penguin/Plume. Sascha is now an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, who has written and produced numerous lauded shows such as Netflix’s GLOW. Sascha loves her two rescued boxer dogs and wearing lots of sunscreen. Blood Sugar is her debut novel.
