LOCK AND KEY

Ruby can handle everything on her own—or at least that’s what she thinks when her mother abandons her a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday. Jodi Dick gives a sensitive performance as the teenaged Ruby, a young person older than her years. Dick conveys all Ruby’s suspicions as she finds herself settled with her older sister, Cora, who left home years earlier and never came back. Ruby’s feelings of alienation are palpable in Dick’s delivery as Ruby finds herself living in Cora’s gated community and going to a private school. Dick also provides believable voices for Ruby’s energetic brother-in-law, the controlling Cora, and the engaging boy next door, who needs Ruby’s help. As Ruby begins to trust her sister’s motives and feel at home with her new family, Dick makes the teenager’s change of heart fully credible. E.N. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2010]