Lemonade Sky

Ruby, Tizz and Sammy are sisters – twelve, ten and five respectively.  They live with their mum, and while they are  never in any doubt as to how much she loves them, she sometimes struggles to look after them properly. Mum, as Ruby explains, has bi-polar.

So when Mum goes for a night out, and doesn’t come home, Ruby takes charge.  It’s not the first time Mum has gone missing, but when it happened before the sisters were taken into care and Ruby is determined not to let that happen again.  They’ll look after themselves and keep Mum’s absence a secret. They gather together all the money in the house, and Ruby shepherds her sisters round the supermarket, planning for ten days alone: that’s how long Mum was missing before.  Despite Ruby’s best efforts, the girls can’t manage,  and she’s soon missing meals, forced to steal food and even toilet rolls from school.

This is an absorbing and very affecting story, told with Jean Ure’s trademark insight and sensitivity, and without any trace of heavy-handedness.  The three girls are real characters, and their relationship with each other very well observed. As a description of what it is like to live with someone suffering from bi-polar disorder, it’s excellent: Ruby and Tizz have lived with their mum’s illness all their lives; they struggle to make her take her tablets and know the signs that means she’s stopped, and they find her episodes of manic energy frightening, but they love her, and there’s never any sense that they are judging her, or blaming her.

Fortunately for the girls, adult help arrives in the shape of one of their mum’s ex-boyfriends – the one Ruby likes the best.  He tracks down the girls’ grandmother, who they’ve never met, and takes them to stay with her.  Mum is brought home too, and taken into a clinic to be looked after.

Things end on a much better note for Ruby and her sisters.  It’s not a perfect happy ending for them – that would be glib and not ring true here – but there’s hope.