This is my fifth read from the Aspen Words longlist and unfortunately it is an early DNF on page 13.
Synopsis
The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman’s hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?
The years since Ruthy’s disappearance haven’t been easy on the Ramirez family. It’s 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.
After seeing maybe‑Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long‑lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future—with or without Ruthy in it.
Thoughts
I liked the premise and looked forward to reflecting on loss, grief and its impact on people. But 13 pages in I had marked out 7 negative comments about bodies and women especially were judged on their looks. Which is a shame because it started with a quote listing a fat man as handsome, giving me hope that the book would be an exception to how fatness is usually written about. It is possible that the main character will reflect on this on the road trip, and change their ways, but realistically this level of behaviour is not something that just disappears after one conversation. The judging of bodies felt overpowering to the synopsis and that level of negativity on bodies is not a space I want to be in unless I know the author will address it in a thoughtful way.
Quotes
“If you drew a map of our family history, you might start it off with my dad, young, fat, and handsome, eighteen-year-old Eddie Ramirez, plotting to get with my moms, who was dark-skinned, small and freckled, long black curly hair.”
“Draw my mother sixty-two pounds later. Give her diabetes.”
“So my mother stood still. For many years. By herself. So that she blew up like a balloon, eleven different sizes.”
“Jessica’s cheeks had grown chipmunkish. Her arms and shoulders had rounded so that she looked like a football player and dark wrinkles had formed around her neck like a noose. Still, she was prettier than me.”
“Mom had changed, too. She’d lost weight since I last saw her, sophomore year, and the flesh on her arms had deflated.”
“Here in the terminal, I felt too aware of the body I had forgotten about while studying late at night. My arms and thighs had grown awkwardly over the last few years from being hunched in front of a computer. And when Jess came in for a hug, I wondered if she could feel the soft slope I’d developed between my shoulders from bending over textbooks at all hours.”
“And she was a vain woman – the type of woman, you could tell who’d looked down at those less attractive than she was her whole life. … The one thing that comforted me was that she was a smoker. And I could smell it, the burnt enamel of her teeth. When she spoke, she wheezed a little bit. And even when she stopped speaking, her breath would creak like a piece of air blowing through an open window. Whenever I felt anxious, I looked at the thin noisy crack between her teeth.”
“I could tell she was a mom by the way she gave zero fucks about her body while taking off her clothes. There were stretchmarks along the sides of her breasts that extended from her nipples like stars. And the skin around her stomach was puckered where somebody had cut her open to take something out.”
Emilie's Bookish Thoughts 