In Store Author Event with Lois Ruby

About the Book

Twelve-year-old Zeb Finley, a New York street urchin, is half dare-devil and half day-dreamer. He’s the last boy off the Orphan Train deep into the Midwestern prairie, sweating in his itchy new clothes when he meets the lonely young widow, Idella Spurlock, waiting at the train stop. She’s alone, he’s alone, and so the two trudge off together.

Neither imagines what will soon season their lives, including a train robber named Tucker, a stash of booty from Tucker’s heist, an encounter with a grey wolf, and swarming grasshoppers that darken the sun, level crops, stop trains in their tracks, and chomp wool off the shirts on their backs. And then there’s the murderous Bender family. Kate Bender promises, “Cross my palm with coin, and I’ll reach your pa in the World Beyond.” Can she, or is she a total fake?

Zeb hankers to hop on a train back to New York where life was free and simple—except for freezing, starving, and sleeping in muddy gutters. But maybe he’ll make his peace with Idella, with a prairie girl named Lucy who teaches him how to shoot a cottontail, with Osage Indians, and with the lovable scoundrel, Tucker. Or maybe not. Before Zeb nearly loses himself on the vast Kansas prairie, he must find his heroic self in the story he’s secretly writing about Montague Mortis, and the Hornswoggled Horse Thief.

About the Author

As an only-child growing up in San Francisco, Lois always had her nose deep in a book, even while crossing the city streets to and from a gorgeous Carnegie library. Her B.A. is in English literature from the University of California/Berkeley, where she met her husband, Dr. Tom Ruby, while they were still teenagers. Her M.A. is in library science, and she was an art and music librarian at the University of Missouri and a YA librarian for the Dallas Public Library. When she started having babies at an alarming rate, Lois was fortunate to be able to stay home and do sweet battle with them as infants and toddlers, while writing an hour a day during Sesame Street. Those boys survived her mothering and turned out pretty well. So, now she’s a full-time writer, dividing her hours among traveling with her husband, researching, writing, teaching, and visiting schools to talk about books and the joy of reading. Lois has had 22 books published, including one biography, two short story collections, and 19 novels. Though she now lives in Ohio, she and Tom raised their children in Kansas and can’t seem to leave the state behind. Her newest book, Living Fire: Jeb Finley and the Hornswoggled Thief, will officially launch in Kansas this November. When kids ask Lois if she’s ever going to retire, she shouts NO! In fact, she says, when she’s dead and buried, her arm will shoot out of the grave with a pen in her cold, cold hand, and she’ll keep writing in the air forever.