Book Review: Ruby Wishfingers: Skydancer’s Escape

Today we bring you a short review of a fun story by Deborah Kelly, illustrated by Leigh Hedstrom. Ruby Wishfingers: Skydancer’s Escape is the story of a girl and her stuffed toy, plus (and most importantly from our perspective) there’s a cat.

The girl with itchy fingers

Ruby Wishfingers is a nine-year-old girl who notices one day that her fingers feel … weird. Itchy. Only her granny will understand, and indeed, Granny reveals something amazing about Ruby’s great-great-great-grandfather: He was a magician. A real one, not like your one weird uncle who pretends to find quarters behind your ear. Anyway, it seems that Ruby has a gift. She can wish things into reality. This, of course, is a tremendous responsibility. Ruby could wish for anything. But, being a little girl, what she wishes is that her stuffed unicorn would become a real unicorn. And bing, bang, boom! Suddenly there’s an actual pink unicorn in her room.

This, as you can imagine, is a problem. Because you may not know this, but unicorns eat curtains and such things. Also there is an inordinate amount of glitter. And they poop … well, let’s not even go there.

Obviously Ruby has to do something to get rid of this unicorn before her parents realize what has happened. Lots of wishes come true along the way, one of which is that Granny’s Maine coon cat, Jupiter, becomes able to speak.

Our verdict

We thought this book was a lot of fun. The cat, Jupiter, only showed up in the story a couple of times, so don’t expect this to be a cat story. It is, in its essence, a unicorn story. Our big complaint is that the formatting on the Kindle edition we read was off, so that there were graphics that did not display correctly and some text was out of place, making the book hard to read in places. We imagine this would not be an issue with the print version, and we think this would be a great read-aloud book, perfect for little girls with stuffed unicorns.

A note on the "Paws Up" system: Miss C gives either one or two paws up. One paw is for a good read; two paws is for a great read. She never gives three or four paws because that would require her to lie on her back...and Miss C does not do that!

We received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review. We wouldn’t tell you it was good unless we really liked it!

The link below is an Amazon Associates link. If you purchase the book through this link, old SoLT and I could get some coin for our kibble account.