When you read fiction, you’re invited to enter a fictional world. The welcome might be prickly—James Joyce isn’t exactly laying down a smooth path for you on the first page of Ulysses—but you’re given the opportunity to meet the people there, peek in their closets, participate in their holidays. Sometimes the world will resemble your own, and you’ll feel validated by seeing people like you on the page. Sometimes the world will be unfamiliar, and you’ll have the privilege of spending time in a place you might not otherwise have access to.
In her debut novel, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, March 7), Claire Jiménez pulls the reader in from the first line: “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. Freshly turned seventeen. Her name is Dolores.” They begin in Brooklyn, but soon you can “draw the Verrazano, the water, the Island, the dump. Draw my proud family, Puerto Rican and loud, driving over the bridge and a little pink town house” on Staten Island. Add three daughters, then subtract one—Ruthy, who disappears when she’s 13 and just may have shown up on a reality TV show her sister Jessica watches 12 years later. Our starred review said, “There’s a delightfully subversive quality to the way…Jiménez gives her characters the freedom to tell the truth as they see it.…Jiménez brings bravery to the page, and it’s her strong storytelling and humor that make this an outstanding debut.”
The characters in Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s debut story collection, When Trying To Return Home (Counterpoint, Feb. 7), don’t fit neatly onto a map. “Now that Andra has moved to South Florida, she has become Andra, Black and Something Else,” the title story begins. “In the northern city, where she grew up, they called her heyyy, you. In the Midwest, where she lived with her father after her parents divorced, she was Kal’s baby. In Puerto Rico, where she watched her mami pass in Ponce, Andra was la negrita, la hija de Nadia.” Like Jiménez’s characters, Andra is situated within her family and community as well as in a physical place. “The stories hang together in surprising ways, often linked across time,” our starred review said. “Individually, they are each admiringly gutsy and tender, with flashes of poetry.”
Maddie, the narrator of Jessica George’s debut novel, Maame (St. Martin’s, Jan. 31), lives in London and works in publishing, but she also begins her story by mapping herself into her family and community: “In African culture—Wait, no, I don’t want to be presumptuous or in any way nationalistic enough to assume certain Ghanaian customs run true in other African countries. I might in fact just be speaking of what passes as practice in my family, but regardless of who the mores belong to, I was raised to keep family matters private.” So none of her friends know that Maddie is caring for her father, who has Parkinson’s disease, while her mother is living in Ghana and running a family business. According to our starred review, George “examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing heroine here.…Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
