What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

Twelve years ago, thirteen year old Ruthy Ramirez left track practice on Staten Island after an argument with a friend and never came home. Her family, Puerto Rican and Pentecostal, never recovered. Her father, Eddie, died five years later. Her mother, Dolores, now diabetic, eats her grief and prays to God in language that would empty a church. Her older sister, Jessica, is worn out by a hospital job, a new baby and years as her mother's main support, and when the youngest, Nina, comes home after a run of medical school rejections, Jessica announces it is Nina's turn. Nina, with a biology degree, takes a job folding bedazzled thongs at a lingerie store in the Staten Island Mall.

Then one sleepless night Jessica, up with the baby, lands on Catfight, a raunchy reality show on which women literally fight their castmates to stay in the house, and sees a contestant who calls herself Ruby. Like Ruthy, she is Puerto Rican and red haired, with the same brown beauty mark under her left eye. The sisters binge the show, weighing whether this hard drinking brawler could be the girl they lost, and plan to drive to Boston, where it films, telling their mother they are going on a retreat for young Christian women. Dolores sees through it, and the three of them set off together with a friend of hers; it is Dolores, not her daughters, who talks her way into the nightclub where the Catfight women are appearing. Along the way Ruthy herself narrates chapters about her last day at school.

Claire Jiménez's first novel is short and fast, and much funnier than its premise suggests. Norah Piehl at Bookreporter noted that relatively little happens in the way of plot, and that the book works best as a composite portrait of a family; Kirkus called it a page turner and praised "strong storytelling and humor." Underneath the jokes it is about grief, family violence and whose disappearances get noticed. It suits readers who like a missing person story that cares more about the people left behind than about the solution.