top of page
Coming Soon

Brigid Haze, a gifted and not-quite-human troublemaker, is attending her third boarding school in a year. Her unlikely ally is her new teacher, Mr. Gershwin, but when he discovers that she has been sneaking off campus with her father’s best friend, he sounds the alarm and calls her parents. Sadly, the next person to meet Brigid is a gruff tow-truck driver named Jay Babineaux, who finds her school ID in the remains of a crushed Jaguar.

 

Two decades later Gershwin is living outside of Boston with his wife and two sons, but as summer begins, one of his boys becomes ill, the other starts ditching camp, and he learns that his wife is having an affair. Desperate to save his family and find some meaning outside of his marriage, Gershwin discovers dead things that don’t stay dead and the conviction that his life can be repaired only with the help of Brigid Haze. Waking the past, however, wakes Babineaux, now a middle-aged detective, and he begins a painful journey that leads him to a woman who cannot be photographed and a family in danger.

The Peculiar Grace of a Shaker Chair

                ...a teacher dreams of summer

The Mountainside School is a ragged little stump in the woods, a lonely child with three minivans, an asthmatic yellow bus, a grimy cafeteria and a collection of dorms that can only be described as fixer-uppers.

 

Jeff Green—Greenie to friends and students—has been teaching there for eight years, but when he becomes the reluctant interim head of the English Department, his life is complicated by unwanted responsibilities, unforseen 

romances and rivals who will stop at nothing to usurp his throne. 

 

 

 

Praise for The Peculiar Grace of a Shaker Chair

Ruderman's novel gives readers a peek at the day-to-day conflicts teachers and their school administrators face. His sharp and witty prose and use of magical realism makes the novel a very entertaining read. -DIgital Journal

bottom of page