Exciting, atmospheric, and well written. I'd like to carry on reading the rest of the series.

Loving this! Smart and interesting characters ~ topics include photography, mysterious spells, class issues, opium and independent/daring females

Excellent mystery.

Love all the characters! Tiny bit too tidy ending for my liking but otherwise hardcore and fun

4.5 stars - wonderful writing, as always from PP. engrossing story that tied off well and did not snooze in the middle. A master storyteller

Such an imaginative plot - even if it pays homage to a different story. I loved the character and the adventure.

Very Holmesian--Sherlock, not Oliver Wendell. The setting, the unknown numbered things that cause death to the hearers (in Holmes it was five orange pips; here's it's seven blessings), the time period, the Indian connections, the opium dens, the sailors, the confusion of identity . . . all very reminiscent of Holmes. Which is by no means a bad thing. I love reading Sherlock Holmes.

I think I was expecting more of a fantasy novel (based on Pullman's other writings, specifically His Dark Materials), so I was a little surprised by the lack of talking armored polar bears, and kept expecting magical things to happen. Still, as a mystery, it's quite good. Sally presents a very interesting and unconventional role model for young women (which is consistent with Pullman's anti-traditional stance as expressed in his well-known trilogy). She is of course pretty (Pullman's not that unconventional), but she has no real domestic skills, is ill-at-ease with children, and has a knack for financial affairs, accounting, and managing her stock portfolio. She is also an excellent shot and carries a pistol with her everywhere she goes. Yet this is no hardened heroine of 29 (though we sense she may be one in the not-too-distant future), but a sharp young woman of 16.

Sally possesses the common YA fiction ability to immediately and accurately identify new acquaintances as friends or foes--Frederick Garland and Jim Taylor being the two most obvious examples of this. Her complete and immediate trust in them grates against the otherwise suspicious trust-no-one attitude encouraged in the book (and it transpires that her father's reliance on his own similar ability was perhaps unwise).

All in all, an enjoyable book, and I look forward to reading further, though we'll see if Pullman's personal views and agenda start to interfere with the story (as in His Dark Materials).

I'm totally a Masterpiece Theatre junkie and I loved the televisionization of this book. I'm surprised how much I liked it, considering the difficulty I'm having reading The Golden Compass (I just can't get into it.) The characters in Ruby just seem so much more lively to me. Anyway, Sally was a great protagonist, being neither a sheepish Victorian youngster, nor a termagant. (Ha! I learned that word in the book!) The story really drove this book, with not a lot of character development as the book progressed nor internal dialogue. However, it worked for me and the characters were already satisfactorily developed!
Anyway, here's what happens:
Sally's father dies, leaving her practically penniless. She goes to live with a cruel distant relative. She receives a mysterious letter that leads her to the offices of her late father, where she meets Jim. During her investigation of the letter, she is given a diary that will explain everything and meets a photographer, Frederick. The mystery deepens when she finds that Mrs. Holland, who is a termagant, threatens her. The diary is stolen before she gets a chance to read it all, except for a few pages that fell out. She ends up moving in the Frederick and his sister and they hire her to be their accounts manager. From there, with the help of all of her new friends, she solves the mystery--of herself, her father, a giant ruby, and some missing money.

Preferred this to the Northern Lights books...