Atwood collection explores grief
Comprised of 15 “stories” (applying that term loosely), the heart of Margaret Atwood’s new collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” features seven vignettes from the lives of characters named Tig and Nell.
Canadians, like the author, these two seem to have had a great life together in Toronto and in a cabin somewhere in the northern woods. Tig has now passed away, and Nell is recounting various slices of their lives together. There’s a very funny look back at a first aid class they took together in their younger years, when “obliviousness had served them well.”
The final Nell and Tig tale drives home the poignancy of grief, as Nell goes through the cabin picking up things that Tig left behind.
The stories not featuring Tig and Nell are more of a mixed bag, but they’re all quick reads. One, titled “Metempsychosis: Or, the Journey of the Soul,” stars a snail resurrected in the body of a “mid-level female customer service representative” at a bank. It’s a cute way to skewer the ridiculous habits of humans.
The book concludes with the title story, which reveals that Nell is the sister of one of the characters featured in a few other tales. They’re at the family cabin reminiscing and cleaning up. Signs of Tig are everywhere, including a pancake griddle hanging on the wall. It prompts a memory of “jovial sourdough pancake fryings … Tig doing the flipping, back when largesse and riotous living and growing children had been the order of the day.” Nell can’t look at it directly, “but she always knows it’s there.” It’s as good a depiction of grief as any and a fitting end to the collection.
Fans of the TV version of “The Handmaid’s Tale”
By Margaret Atwood; Doubleday, 272 pages, $30. may not flock to read “Old Babes in the Wood,” but Atwood purists will find enough here to like. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press
If true crime is your guilty pleasure,
you absolutely must find out what happened to Ruthy Ramirez.
One cold November day in 1996, 13-year-old Ruthy doesn’t come home from track practice after school. Over a decade later, a woman who looks just like Ruthy appears on the reality TV show “Cat Fight,” going by the name Ruby. “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” the compelling true-crime-style debut novel by Claire Jimenez, follows the Ramirez family as they pick up the search for Ruthy.
Missing persons are disproportionately Black or brown and rarely found — something the author and her characters are well aware of — leaving the Ramirez family torn when they see Ruby on TV.
Jess, Ruthy’s older sister, is convinced the moment she sees her. All she has to do is find an excuse to have her mom watch the baby and get a weekend off from work to drive out to where “Cat Fight” films. Ruthy’s younger sister, Nina, is the hardest to convince but ‘What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez’ By Claire Jimenez; Grand Central, 240 pages, $28. agrees to help track down “TV Ruthy.”
As the sisters sneak around their uber-religious, strict Puerto Rican mother, family dysfunctions resurface. Work, church and family drama provide subplots that open up conversations on identity, trauma and opportunity.
But it’s also a light, easy read. Jimenez’s style is thoroughly conversational. She sprinkles in jokes and wordplay, counterbalancing the heavy topics — including sexual abuse and violence — and rounding out her characters as more than the sum of their tragedies.
Jimenez keeps readers anticipating the moment we’re all morbidly curious about: Ruthy’s disappearance. Did she run away as Nina thinks? Or is Jessica right and she was kidnapped? By whom? We don’t find out until the very last pages what happened to Ruthy Ramirez.
And really, the book isn’t about that, anyway. It subverts the often traumaporn-ridden true-crime genre and instead centers on the family losing and regaining hope, living life with a big, mysterious, Ruthy-shaped hole in it.