Front cover of The Red Suitcase. Image from here.
At school, Room 27 is split into 3 groups for reading. There’s a group reading Skellig, a group reading In The Sea There Are Crocodiles, and a group reading The Red Suitcase. Guess which book I’m reading! (hint hint: look at the title)
My summary: A girl named Ruth Scott has to move to Takapuna, Auckland because of a bomb in Indonesia, which is where she used to live. Weird things begin when Ruth starts having vision-like things about an airman in World War 2, and the only person who can help her is Thomas Barnard and Ruth’s old friend Sally Francis.
The actual summary on the back of the book: A terrorist bomb has forced Ruth’s family to leave Indonesia and return to Takapuna, Auckland, where she desperately tries to establish a life at her new school. But instead she finds herself inexplicably sharing the exploits of a mysterious airman who went missing during World War 2
The only person who makes sense of what’s happening to Ruth is Thomas Barnard – he knows something about the slippery nature of time. Help also comes from Ruth’s old friend Sally, who has a mysterious problem of her own. The Red Suitcase is an exciting story about a war that won’t go away, the uncertainties of peace and the need for friends to make sense of both.
My opinion on the book: I rate The Red Suitcase a 6 1/2 out of 10. At the start everyone in The Red Suitcase reading group was getting quite bored, but at the end it gets really tense (we have to read up to a certain chapter each week, and last week we had to stop on the most gigantic cliffhanger that I’ve ever read!)! Also the book could be clearer on what people/places look like (when Ruth had her vision-things, the book described what the place looked like pretty well). The plot is quite good, although it was very predictable; pretty much everyone in The Red Suitcase group could guess what was going to happen. And the ending is TERRIBLE!
What I think of the ending (obviously DON’T READ THIS BIT IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE WHOLE BOOK!): The ending was HORRIBLE in my opinion (unless there’s a sequel to The Red Suitcase). Sure, I mean the last sentence is good (“‘I have something amazing to show you,’ she said.”), but it left a lot of questions. Here are all my questions:
Episode questions:
How did Jonah hear Ruth? Why did Jonah believe that Ruth was his great-great niece when Ruth said ‘Jonah. I’m sitting in front of you. I’m your great-great niece, Ruth.’? How did Jonah give Ruth the tiki? Why did he give Ruth the tiki? Could Jonah see Ruth? If so, did she suddenly appear in front of Jonah from Jonah’s point of view? If not, then how did Jonah give Ruth the tiki if he couldn’t see Ruth? How did Ruth leave Thomas’s stone in the dinghy? How was the stone sent back in the red suitcase if it was from the future? Did Ruth alter the past when she dropped the stone? How did Thomas have the stone if it was in the suitcase, sent back from the dinghy? Did Ruth ever have another episode after the one in which Jonah gave her the tiki? And of course, how did Ruth have the episodes???
Mick vs Thomas fight questions:
What happened to Mick? Did he go to jail? Was there any lasting damage on Nan or Thomas? What happened to Sally’s family? It says that Nan was alive, but what happened to her? What happened to Thomas? How long did Thomas and Nan have to stay in the hospital?
General questions:
I bet you forgot Ari, but what happened to her? How long did Rich and Mum stay in Auckland, or did they stay?
I have waaaaaaay more questions, but I have to go now. Overall, The Red Suitcase is a pretty good book, so you should read it! Oh, and I never said; The Red Suitcase is written by Jill Harris